PARACOSM (2019)

“The grave and the image [of what was lost] are equally links with the irrevocable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want.” - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Through the medium of the moving body, and featuring music composed by Tilly Webb, this piece explores the imagined place (paracosm) induced by grief. The place where one remembers what was, but as they remember they forget that they too are forgetting. Forgetting perhaps only small things, but things that risk fundamentally shifting the truth of the whole. Lacking the voice that once would have called these discrepancies into account, one is left with a subjective memory in place of an objectively shared relationship.

So at what point does remembering shift into reimagining? What is this tension between reality and the paracosm? And how does one continue with the basic tasks of everyday life as they remember what was, reconcile what is, and attempt to move beyond?”

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Duration: 30 mins

Choreographer: Hadassah Wallis

Performers: Hadassah Wallis

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Paracosm premiered in 2019 for Immerse and won the Young Artists Award.  

It was developed with generous support from Knox City Council and Swinburne University.