Choreographer/ Creative Edit – Gemma Crowe
Artistic Direction — Alina Sotskova
Choreography – Alina Sotskova & Rachel Helten
Dancers — Alina Sotskova, Rachel Helten, Samanth Presley, Sophie Brassard
Supporting Cast & Production Assistant — Jason Kirkness
Sound Design — Alina Sotskova & Chris Giles
Drone Operator — Ian Cunningham
Dracula’s Garden is an interdisciplinary art and dance series inspired by Gothic literature.
The larger Dracula’s Garden series explores themes of beauty; ugliness; deformity; grotesque; psychology of the unconscious; psychological and cultural projections onto the Gothic character; the fear of the Other as the fear of the self; and juxtaposition of the Gothic themes with the classical ballet ideology of beauty.
“Dracula’s Garden Rising” explores movement on film via contemporary pointe technique, offering a critique of the classic ballet aesthetic. Paralleling the Gothic themes of deformity, we explore how pointe can evolve beyond the aesthetic of the idealized concept of beauty. We are particularly interested in how the notion of the Other in Gothic literature is used as a parallel for persons deemed ‘undesirable’ or ‘threatening’ by society. We work with the idea that the monsters and Others in Gothic literature are a projection of human fears and a representation of social exclusion via dehumanization of groups that are deemed alien and Other.
