and THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE

Earthly Joys Company’s “And the World Would Be a Better Place” is a sci-fi dance performance, an attempt to envision a better world that might emerge from the cultural and natural ruins that house and recycle our bodies.
How can we find the strength to gather the new within discord? This question takes the form of a performance that reflects in dance on the connection to the earth, on how the new emerges in the ruins, and on the future.

Turning to religious vocal music (Baroque stabat mater sequences and the Indian genre of dhrupad), we hear in it a longing for transition, for overcoming — a longing that is close to us and yet has faded into the past, become a ruin. In the arrangement and reassembly of this music, a soundscape emerges in which dancing bodies are co-configured.

The memory of places of strength and inspiration extends this landscape into the space of the imagination. Each of the dancers discovers traces of a past that has not yet happened — a (primordial) future in which reality and fantasy form a layered, as yet uncharted terrain.

Dance is all the time in between, and this is its property that this performance celebrates as a hymn. Repeated form scatters into syncretic shards and singular trajectories, everything continues, weaves together, sticks together, and disintegrates again. A failure of linear time. And so it must be.

and THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE

and THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE

And THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE, 2024
Dance performance ✺ Duration — 71 minutes
✺ Dance company {EARTH’S JOY} Idea and score: Anya Kravchenko
✺ Dance: Tanya Zaskalko, Nadia Grankina, Nastya Popova, Anya Kravchenko
✺ Sound: Varya Pavlova (Lisokot), including recompose Stabat Mater in F Minor, RV 621 by Antonio Vivaldi
✺ Set design and costumes: Sofya Skidan (with the participation of rasa gaya, loutique lingerie brands)
✺ Make up: Olga Khomenchuk
✺ Lighting: Alexander Skrypnik, Andrey Oleinik
✺ Photography: Alexander Ignatovich
✺ Graphics: Victoria Kibe