THE PICNIC
Direction & Choreography: Eva Recacha
Scenography: Kate Lane
Sound: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Lighting Design: Jackie Shemesch
Associate Lighting Designer: Joe Hornsby
Rehearsal Director/ Assistant choreographer: Scilla Rajalin
Production Manager: Ben Moon
Costume Supervisor: Sophie Donaldson
Costume Assistands: Francis Morris & Emma Lyth
Performance and devising: Alicja Nauman, Charlotte Mclean. Scilla Rajalin & London Contemporary Dance School Students Alma Kremnitzer, Bris Elorza Ordoñez, Eduarda Faccio Barone, Elina Wates, Jack Baron, Jon Rodd, Louise Warwicker, Mahala, Tucker, Ro Goodman, Rosie Robertson, Serra Rosebay, Sian Yi, Xel Renata Ortega Garcia
Promotional Images: Rocio Chacón
Production Images and Super 8 Film: Camilla Greenwell
The Picnic was a contemporary dance work staging a utopian ideal of pleasure, care, and co-existence. Inspired by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the piece enacts performative acts of resistance through moments of visibility, dignity, desire, and joy, inviting audiences into a live, embodied experience of radical care and revelry.
The Picnic explored the scenographic and choreographic practices fostering an equitable relationship between human and non-human performative agents, resisting anthropocentric perspectives. Drawing on theories of material agency and the carnivalesque, The Picnic was an assemblage of human and non-human actants engaged in a sensuous, non-hierarchical ecology, exploring how the work facilitates collective resistance and joy through its design-led, embodied approach.
Premiered 27 - 29 November 2024, Lilian Balylis Studio, Sadlers Wells, London
Co-comissioned by Sadlers Wells and South East Dance with support from London Contemporary Dance School and Arts Council England