Cécile B. Evans

The story takes place in a distant future, where climate change and failed cities have compelled many people to migrate to rural areas. Giselle and her friends have moved to the forest to live with her mother and run a distillery that uses a wild microbe indigenous to the area: a "super-bacterium" that has tranformative properties capable of generating electricity for their village. Giselle falls in love with a young man from the city named Albrecht, who presents himself as a philosopher. It is revealed that he is the scion to a very powerful family at the head of a technofascist state sent to the village to gather information on their way of life and the energetic properties of the super-bacteria. Filled with remorse for endangering her community, Giselle dies. After her death, she transfers to another realm and is met by Myrthe, Queen of the Wilis and a manifestation of the bacteria’s radical transformation. Where in the original, the Wilis are a gang of scorned women, they now represent indeterminate beings in a state of perpetual mutation. Giselle's death is now reimagined to conjure mutability and multiplicity as strategies for survival.

Notations (from the term "choreographic notations") is a narrative in constant process of mutation and rewriting. Its starting point is the crucial transition at the heart of the story: Giselle's death and her subsequent encounter with the Wilis, developing into a performance that blends script drafts, dance, video, security camera footage, deep AI, human and synthesised voices, music and sound. These live experiments, or "notations", interact with a series of "living" sculptural stations, and incorporate a multitude of dramaturgical references to intersect the broader themes of the project.

Cécile B. Evans (1983) is a Belgian-American artist, living and working in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine, Metz (France), Tramway, Glasgow (UK), Museo Madre, Naples (Italy), Mumok Vienna (Austria), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (Italy), Galerie Emmanuel Layr, Vienna (Austria), Tate Liverpool (UK), Kunsthalle Aarhus (Denmark), M Museum Leuven (Belgium), De Hallen Haarlem (Netherlands), and Serpentine Galleries, London (UK). Their work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions including the Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK), Haus der Kunst, Munich (Germany), Renaissance Society Chicago (USA) and the 9th Berlin Biennale (Germany).