Last Shelter

Last Shelter is a performance experiment exploring the enduring human desire to build something together.

The piece unfolds uniquely at each performance. Teetering at the edge of what could be in an ever-shifting environment, this choreography highlights the velocity and precision of each dancer’s decision-making from moment to moment, somewhere between agency and collective will. After a year of working invisibly through a pandemic, it is an act of intimacy to witness the labour and desire of the dancer attending to themselves and one another, in their practice.

With rigour and care, the dancers surrender to and grapple with time, place and fate, finding temporary balance in provisional structures and makeshift meanings. With sound score by composer Tian Rotteveel, light design by Zeynep Kepekli, and set/costume design by Nicolai Hart-Hansen.

Built on actions, not acting, this composition and decomposition of scenarios is strangely fascinating: the form is clear, the content is not. The ravishing, enigmatic sonorities of Tian Rotteveel’s unobtrusive score – itself a series of scenarios in sound – hold the mood of mystery. 

★★★★ The Guardian

Find the digital programme (including access content and insight materials) here.

Choreographer’s Notes

I began my research with Candoco in much the same way I have begun most projects in the last decade, with a practice I call nonstopping. At its core, nonstopping is a process of undoing through, paradoxically, nonstop doing. It works with uncensoring movement and speech as acts of freedom and imperative force and change.  Sometimes proposing impossible possibilities and acts of keen attention and urgency, the crafted decision-making of the Candoco ensemble in the midst of these proposals, in real-time is the foundation of this work, highlighting both precarity and precision. What strikes me about the Candoco ensemble is their intimacy, trust and generosity toward one another and this is a perfect place from which to interrogate choreography as a container for radical togetherness and transformation.

Insight Films

Candoco’s dancers offer thoughts on their experience of creating Last Shelter with Jeanine Durning and explore some of the core concepts of the work. There are 6 films in the playlist with audio description on Soundcloud (see below).

Meet Tian Rotteveel, Last Shelter composer, as he speaks about not being about to sit still, working with Jeanine and the role of music in her work, and how the audience affects a work of art.