The Leftovers- Adelaide Fringe

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2021 Best Emerging Artist Award winners Motus Collective bring back their Adelaide Festival Inspace Program work, a collaboration with visual artist Nicholas Hanisch, The Leftovers, to Carclew House this Fringe Festival from the 24th to the 28th of February.



In Plutarch's Life of Theseus, the paradox of the Ship of Theseus is preserved: if you replace every plank, every screw on the ship, over time, until all original parts are gone, is it the same ship? One answer to the thought experiment is that it is the same ship if the story told about it remains the constant.

In The Leftovers, according to Motus Collective's Felicity Boyd and Zoe Gay, the Theseus paradox is transposed onto the human body."There's so many cycles of how long it takes our teeth to grow and how long it takes your hair to grow; the body's constantly throwing away things," Zoe says. "You're never the same person that you were a minute ago because there's this super-evolution where you're continuing to grow, continuing to change."

Unlike Plutarch's ship, though, the stories we tell about ourselves, our identities, are often in flux."It's that cycle of who am I, what's happening, oh I think I'm this, and then oh maybe I'm not that and I'm this instead"., Felicity says.

This state of fluidity is reflected not only in Motus Collective's choreography, but also the humanoid sculptures of award-winning visual artist Nicholas Hanisch, who went to primary school with Zoe, when they were both different incarnations of themselves.
"His idea of the primordial sludge that the sculptures are made out of, the dancers are this moldable substance or becoming beings," Felicity says."He writes about what he calls these Gollums or people "like" things and how you can get people to feel for these lifeless objects and the human want to project [onto the sculptures]", Zoe says.

The Leftovers, then, is not just a meditation on our own ever shifting self-conceptions but also our capacity to project and mold our perceptions of others. It is also an opportunity for visual arts lovers and dance enthusiasts to expose themselves to alternative viewpoints on universal human experiences.

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