Winning choreographer and artistic director Rosie Kay, announces television journalist Adam Curtis has joined the company’s MK ULTRA team as creative collaborator.
MK ULTRA, which will show at HOME from Wed 3 May, is a new dance work that will explore the strange and weird stories that have risen up on the internet. Stories that millions of young people across the world have become fascinated by – as they turn away from believing anything they are told by those in power.
MK ULTRA is about the one of the strangest and most bizarre of those stories – set in the strange realm of modern pop culture, it is about mind control conspiracies which the Illuminati are using to control most of the major pop stars. It reunites Kay’s 5 SOLDIERS creative team and sees designer wunderkind Gary Card creating his first costume designs for contemporary dance.
Adam Curtis is well known for his films such as Bitter Lake and the recent HyperNormalisation. He made the series The Power of Nightmares for the BBC that challenged and exposed many of the conspiracy theories behind the reporting of Islamist terrorism, and has also worked in partnership to create live shows – with Massive Attack, and with the immersive theatre group Punchdrunk. Curtis will work with Kay to give a wider political and social context to MK ULTRA.
Curtis said: “Over the past twenty years millions of people have given up believing in the grand stories told them by politicians and others in power. This has created a vacuum into which have rushed all kinds of strange and bizarre stories about the hidden forces that are really controlling the world.
“I find them fascinating – because, on the one hand they show how in our chaotic and uncertain time people are desperately seeking evidence that someone, anyone, is really in control. But at the same time people also hate the idea of control – because everybody these days wants to be an independent, free individual. And I think it is the tension between these two – the desire for control and the desire for freedom – that leads to such strange and bizarre stories rising up.
“I think Rosie’s idea to explore this strange world is brilliant. Because it is a way of looking at how people really see the world today. It’s a way of looking behind the shiny surface of modern society – a surface that the politicians and their journalistic allies are desperately trying to hold in place – and seeing the real tensions and anxieties that are actually shaping how we feel today.”
MK ULTRA is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and is commissioned by DanceXchange, Warwick Arts Centre & Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
To book your tickets, call the HOME box office on 0161 2001 1500 or click here.