SOFTTRAP 2021

Activators 6: SOFTTRAP by Amber McCartney

SOFTTRAP is a single-channel screen work by dancer and choreographer Amber McCartney that uses body horror tropes to redefine the flesh as a site for harbouring instability.  The work questions the potential of the body as it is extended and expanded through physical and artificial manipulation.

Using replicas of her own arms, created by McCartney and special effects makeup artist, Kiana Jones, the artist inhabits a transformed body that fluctuates between eerily familiar and disturbingly foreign.  Over the course of the film, McCartney attempts complete embodiment in an experimental purging of the internal in an attempt to experience human form as both the subject and object of terror.

An accompanying sound design by Morgan Hickinbotham intensifies the viewer’s discomfort and unease made manifest in the work, where the body exists as a mutable site for trauma and catharsis, between the real and imagined.

Creative Team

Created by: Amber McCartney

Sound: Morgan Hickinbotham

Prosthetics: Kiana Jones

Presentation dates: Digital Livestream and Artist Talk, Thursday, 21 October 2021

SOFTTRAP is commissioned as part of Chunky Move’s Activators program and was first developed through funded research opportunity, SOLITUDE 1 from Chunky Move in partnership with the Tanja Liedtke Foundation.

Activators is Chunky Move’s commissioning program for small scale experimental new work with an open ended approach to the format and platform for presentation. We commission multiple works annually and the program is curated by invitation only. Activators is grounded in choreographic approaches to site, space, time and material with the body at the centre of investigation. The program acknowledges expanded practice in art making as an aspect informing contemporary dance and Activators commissioned artists play a role in shaping and influencing contemporary and future dance practice. Previous works in the program have explored digital screen based practice and animation, hybrid performance lecture contexts, gallery formats and live streamed events.

Statement from Antony Hamilton, Artistic Director of Chunky Move about Activators 6 & 7.

Amber McCartney’s SOFTTRAP and Harrison Hall and Luca Dante’s Maelstrom each reflect different perspectives on disembodiment and physical augmentation, contributing narratives to the notion of the contemporary and future human. They are both works informed by a dancer’s sensibility and grounded in the philosophical question of whether we can be certain that the body is real. Reality is explored in these works through the dual prisms of the physical world, more often thought of as concrete, true, measurable and the digital world, which is more often experienced as shadowy, ephemeral even infinite. What connects these works is the projection of fictional avatars of the human body.

In SOFTTRAP the body is the host for parasitic distortions that are beyond our control, using ‘body horror’ tropes of the cinematic genre to disturbing effect. They represent our deepest dread that our bodies can be compromised, that our immune system is alert to the constant presence of potential danger and that ultimately, we are an unstable collection of matter, constantly reorganizing itself. SOFTTRAP is a reminder that the human is not an impenetrable and eternal archetype, but a confluence of organisms that will one day perhaps look nothing like the body we know.

In Maelstrom, the vastness of time and space sets the scene for an unsettling dance of nameless skins. The uncanny movements of these digital embodiments forewarn us of the fragility of reality, as it has been perceived through the traditional senses and historical lens until very recently. As bodies fly and swirl in an absurd dance that warps earthly limits, Maelstrom drags us like rag dolls from the present, flinging our flailing limbs onto the threshold of tomorrow.

With the promethean development of deep fakes present in our consciousness, we are entering a new era that challenges the nature of reality itself. Is reality in peril, or opening to new utopian horizons? Is the human body simply subject to the environmental conditions placed upon it or is it an agent in a mutable relationship with its surroundings? SOFTTRAP and Maelstrom allow us to reflect on these timely questions.