Julia Croft is a live artist and performance maker based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Julia’s practice draws on feminist and queer theory to create performance works that are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous, trying and failing at building a feminist future, worlding, becoming, making too much mess and too much noise, the works are deeply political and deeply sentimental. Her work is concerned with creating imaginative cracks in pervasive power structures, slippery and leaky spaces, the scientific-poetic and bad pop music.
Since 2015 she has created 10 full length works including 4 solo works: If There's Not Dancing at the Revolution, I'm Not Coming, Power Ballad, Working On My Night Moves and Terrapolis. These works have toured extensively throughout NZ as well as Australia, the UK, Singapore and Canada, including to the Yard Theatre (UK), Battersea Arts Centre (UK), The Cultch (CAN) and The Esplanade.(SING) Working On My Night Moves was awarded a prestigious Total Theatre Award at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as an Auckland Theatre Award for Excellence. Her most recent solo Terrapolis was set to be performed in August 2020 but due to lockdowns will now premiere in 2022.
She works regularly as a teaching artist with young people in drama schools across Aotearoa. She was part of a 3 year arts residency curated by The Basement (NZ), Forest Fringe (UK) & West Kowloon Cultural District (HK) other residencies include Time Place Space residency through Arts House (Melbourne) and Mala Voadora in Porto, Portugal.
www.juliacroft.com
Working On My Night Moves
Artform: Theatre / Live Art
Development Status: Tour Ready
Media Uploads
Trailer
Synopsis
“time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.”
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway.
Breaking the rules, the patriarchy and the the time/space continuum. A search for multiple feminist futurisms, reaching for outer space, inciting a Wizard of Oz fever dream. A gesture toward the impossible. An ode to the search for utopia…. Or just some moves in the night.
Working On My Night Moves is a live art investigation of potential feminist futurism(s) and a celebration of the uncertain as a political stance. It is a poetic attempt to build a black hole and reach outer space and a love letter to the spaces that sit in between. By diffusing the power in the room could we ultimately defy gender, and the patriarchy, time and space?
An award winning genre - defying performance work that takes the audience on a journey through constructed potential universes and out into the cosmos.
Creative Team and Crew
Created by JULIA CROFT & NISHA MADHAN
Performed by JULIA CROFT
Directed by NISHA MADHAN
Performance design by MEG ROLLANDI
Lighting design by CALVIN HUDSON
Sound design by TE AIHE BUTLER with original compositions by JASON WRIGHT
Dramaturg: KATE PRIOR
Movement Advisor: SARAH FOSTER-SPROULL
Production Manager: RUBY REIHANA-WILSON
Operator: JESSIE MCCALL (Akl) // ANNA BENNINGTON (Edinburgh)
Number of People in the Touring Party
4-5
Previous Seasons
March 2019 - Basement Theatre, Auckland (as part of their inaugural co-production initiative "Basement Visions.")
August 2019 - Summerhall, Edinburgh (as part of the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival)
February 2020 - The Yard theatre, London (as part of the NOW Festival of contemporary performance)
Further seasons in UK, Europe and China in 2020 were cancelled due to COVID 19.
Reviews and Quotes
“A radical show that finds the right form to shine new light.”
— LYN GARDNER
“Working On My Night Moves is a piece that makes other work on the Fringe look dated. Days after seeing [it] the show is still hovering in the mind. ★★★★”
— EDINBURGH REPORTER
“a work of dynamic and mesmerising performance art ★★★★”
— THE STAGE
“Original, individual, and at times simply breathtaking...tender and captivating ★★★★”
— THE SKINNY
“Night Moves is less occupied with reframing and interrogating familiar debates around feminism and art. Night Moves wants to start from scratch.”
— THE PANTOGRAPH PUNCH
“The whole production places the audience in another world. And it is a world worth visiting. ★★★★”
— FEST MAGAZINE
Technical Rider & International Touring Info (if applicable)
Terrapolis
Artform: Theatre / Live Art
Development Status: In Development
Media Uploads
Synopsis
“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in the thick present...staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present...as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.”
Donna Haraway Staying with the trouble
TERRAPOLIS is a new performance work that aims to investigate alternative webs of relationships between human bodies and the “natural” through new imagined ecologies and eco-systems. Performatively looking to reimagine our place in the world and our relationships across social spaces, desires, societies, species and objects, TERRAPOLIS seeks to reimagine threads of relationships that might be moving us closer to a sustainable way of existing with each other. Inspired by Feminist and Queer science studies, TERRAPOLIS builds a world out of re-imagined histories and mythologies as well as new relationships across species, space and time.
This work is being developed in collaboration with designers Meg Rollandi and Jason Wright in order to build a mutli-layered performance eco-system.
Creative Team and Crew
Created and performed by Julia Croft
Performance Design: Meg Rollandi
Sound design: Jason Wright
Number of People in the Touring Party
3-4
Previous Seasons
Developments:
July 2019 - West Kowloon Arts District, Hong Kong (As part of the "International Co-Lab")
September 2019 - Battersea Arts Centre, London
- The Marlborough. Brighton
January 2020 - Development workshop supported by CNZ
Reviews and Quotes
"I was very pleased to see the early sharing of Terrapolis that she performed as part of the final Co-Lab gathering in Hong Kong in July 2019. The material she presented had the exciting fragility and freshness of something very new, but nevertheless felt like an incredibly bold artistic proposition. I remember thinking how both Julia as a performer and the material inhabited a kind of gentle stand-off with the audience, warm and playful but not shying away from discomfort or awkwardness, taking and giving space as an artist and a woman in a way I think is rare."
Ira Brand - Curator of Forest Fringe and co -curator of the International Co-Lab
Technical Rider & International Touring Info (if applicable)
- View/download document #1 here
The Performing Arts Network of New Zealand (PANNZ) Arts Market is New Zealand's premiere event for artists, producers, presenters and industry leaders from across the performing arts sector.
The Performing Arts Network of New Zealand (PANNZ) Arts Market is New Zealand's premiere event for artists, producers, presenters and industry leaders from across the performing arts sector.