Presented as part of Bloom 2024: a series of double-bills featuring performances developed with BAC

The Aching is an exploration of the temporality of grief.

Using folk songs from Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, The Aching is a song cycle, gently lulling audiences into a fever dream.

Gentle yet brutal, it speaks to the seemingly eternal nature of the human capacity to experience suffering, while simultaneously transforming this suffering into creative expressions that complexify, and, in turn, transcend certain suffering.

The Aching is a gestural experiment.
Death as an archetypal study.
Grief as a melody.
Misery as a choreographic object.

The Aching will be followed by 30-minute film Reunion.

Reunion is a new video work made in collaboration by Samir Kennedy and artist Jame St Findlay. Shot over 7 days and nights in a former Ursuline Convent in Montpellier, the film explores death and misery through some of the more absurd, horrific and mundane manifestations.

Samir Kennedy is a British/Algerian dance, performance and sound artist based between the UK and France. He makes interdisciplinary works across video, sound, choreography and performance which centre the body as a site from which to perform notions of class, race, otherness, queerness and abjection using archetypal figures (such as the devil, the zombie, the clown) as vehicles from the collective consciousness which drive complex readings.

This performance is a double-bill. See this show alongside Katy Baird’s Get Off by booking Pay What You Can tickets for both performances on the same evening.