MadDoG

Inspired by a practice of lace work, MadDoG is a knot where dissonant notions/materials are tied together. The knot unfolds not only choreographically, but also through the use of symbolic objects, spoken text, and music. dancer and choreographer Lydia McGlinchey understands expression and movement to be inseparable: the body is always ‘charged’, never devoid of sensation or emotion.

The performance embodies the extreme disparities of contemporary experience where depictions of mass murder follow job ads and photoshopped women on yachts follow portrayals of natural disaster. This encounter with tightly bound contradictions is where McGlinchey sees knotting as a pertinent aesthetic stake. The confrontation with contrasting sentiments marks us all. The work disharmonizes beauty with what’s grim, thus challenging the binary logic of ‘Utopia’ vs ‘No Future’. MadDoG takes on the figure of a rabid dog: a deranged energetic excess.

MadDoG takes from the gothic genre by understanding the human as a site of perversion and deterioration. Staging desire as ‘astrayed’, the performers seek to become objects, generic surfaces stripped of context. The gothic genre has always been fascinated with the prospect of undermining the ‘true/authentic’ self. MadDoG understands the alleged ‘fakeness’ of the contemporary subject as a material reality. The fake has real consequences. Influencers have influence. MadDoG works through the Gothic by staging crude, fragmentary, and warped forms. The work seeks to leave audiences with what the artist calls ‘sublime horror’, an affect rooted in the history of Gothicism’s disenchantment of the Romantic sublime, inducing both wonder and fear at the same time.

Lace is a technique derived from ancient knotting/net-making. Textile designer Elena Vloeberghen and McGlinchey developed several large-scale lace works together with the Texture Museum in Kortrijk through which knotting is brought onto the stage in an expanded sense.