By Emily Jacir with collaborating artists Andrea De Siena, Walter Laureti, & Valeria Taccone.
The Belly Cries and the Dogs Laugh is a new performance excavating the history of the White Bay Power Station. Co-devised with a collective of artists from the Mediterranean, alongside a number of local performers, the work addresses circulating movements, translocal lives, the cultivation of kinship networks across distances, sites of belonging, hospitality and exclusion.
The silence, solitude, and confinement of working in isolation are juxtaposed with the joy, rhythm, and movement of gathering with community in public space. A traverse between those who are forced to whisper and those who can scream, between proximity and distance, between personal history and collective trauma.
With an entirely new movement score, and live music, rooted in the the popolare music and dance of Southern Italy, this will be the first performance in the White Bay Entertainment Hall since the site was decommissioned in 1984.
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and QATAR Museums Authority.
Image courtesy of the NSW State Archives
