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Container or music series
First it was rainforest
Wellington 2021
Katrina Elizabeth Bastian
The Amazon rainforest has been a life-giving source and habitat for millions of integral native species. Still, an internet search for “Amazon” brings up a multinational company whose blue-collar employees earn below the minimum wage, and are forced to work in unsanitary and unsafe conditions; while its executives increase their personal wealth by $24 billion in the year 2020 alone.
First it was a rainforest is a physicalized search-engine experience into the embodiment of labor. Visitors are welcome to order a movement from a touch screen interface where more than 200 gestures are warehoused. This 8-hour installation reflects the human cost of a consumer landscape where everything is just a click away. By reducing the degrees of separation between workers and consumers and giving physical expression to the exhaustion wrought by the need for instant gratification we make the true cost of our patterns of consumption visible.
Katrina Elizabeth Bastian began her choreographic career at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, where she investigated the phenomenon of the grotesque in dance and literature. She
graduated with high honours in 2015. Katrina then moved on to a choreographic residency at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and soon joined the Orian Theatre Dance Company of
Paris, France. As a dancer, Katrina has worked with choreographers and artists in Europe, the
United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. She graduated from the
Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT) in 2019 with a Masters Degree in Choreography.
Katrina recently presented her work in The Performance Arcade 2020, Tempo Dance Festival
#goingdigital season, and engaged in a digital residency facilitated by Movement Art Practice
Christchurch, as well as working with Footnote Dance Company’s Choreoco.
Olivia McGregor is a dance artist from New Zealand. After graduating from the New Zealand
School of dance in 2010, Olivia joined Footnote Dance Company (2011-2014) performing in
works by choreographers Lisa Densem, Kate McIntosh, Jo Randerson, Ross McCormack and
Gendall’s development of the interface.
BodyCartography Project among others. Since moving to Berlin in 2016, she has been working
around Europe in film, performance art installations and dance works with artists including
Jeremy Shaw, Julian Weber and Constanza Macras (Dorky Park). Her practice often works with
improvisation based on somatic movement material combining embodiment of sound, space and
body.
Flinn Gendall has been working on sound and music for theatrical productions in Poneke
Wellington since graduating from the New Zealand School of Music, where he studied
composition and sonic art. Flinn is also a developer and is interested in the ways coding can be
used to finely control recorded and synthesised sounds. He and Katrina collaborated on
Zugzwang 2020, The Hollo(w)ing, and Dance Care Map- a digital resource for mental health for
dancers.
Concept, Choreography & Performance: Katrina E. Bastian; Performance: Olivia McGregor + Eliza Sanders; Sound + Programming: Flinn Gendall, Graphic Design: TBC
