Picking out the Glass
Dancing Lives
Dancing Lives, directed by Jim Hughes, featuring Lucette Aldous, Elizabeth Dalman and Cheryl Stock, for Fieldworks Performance Group. Premiered, Perth 1995.
Director’s note:
Dancing lives tells the story of lives, careers, tragedies and heroic achievements of three great legends of Australian dance. The experience, knowledge and dignity which these mature dancers possess, still inform movement and dance in a very special way. Dancing Lives gives recognition to the enormous contribution that Lucette Aldous, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and Cheryl Stock have made to Australian dance history.
All three women declare through their work a passion for beauty, for survival and the ability to release the past and totally live in the present.
Alison Farmer, Sunday Times, 10 December 1995, p. 82
‘Picking Out the Glass’ choreographed, written and performed by Cheryl Stock, music Sarah Hopkins (Reclaiming the Spirit and Invocation), lighting Duncan Ord, design Kristen Anderson, sound Dereck Kreckler.
A personal journey of fragments of experience, as remembered by the body.
Stock’s ‘Picking out the Glass’ danced the experience of a career-threatening, disabling accident. Climbing down a rope ladder towards her fate, Stock stepped through and along a black carpet spread with bones. She kneeled and slowly, with her bowed head, rolled up the black textile and its burden. Backed by Frieda Kahlo-like slides Stock... distorted her body movements, picked glass from her mouth. Overcoming her injuries, she danced again with glorious angular muscular power... the dance was choreographically tight and dramatic.
Rita Clarke, The Australian, 8 December 1995