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Food Chain Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood

Gavin Webber. Photo: Maurice Korbel

	Co-Directors/Dancers	Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood
	Music Composition	Marc Teitler
	Sound Design	Luke Smiles
	Set & Costume Design	Moritz Mueller
	Dramaturgy	Inga Schonlau
	Lighting Design Dancers	Mark Howett Tommy Noonan, Kate Harman, Gabrielle Nankivell, Josh Thomson

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	Food Chain is a new dance theatre work exploring animality, sex, voyeurism, performance and power.
	Food Chain begins in a naïve forest. Bears are top of the food chain. They lure in humans with food, the smell of a dead body, the tape recording of a baby crying with the desire to experiment on them – firstly for food and then with the desire of watching them sexually active. They are bears and also men in bear suits. Clumsy, threatening, cute and ultimately alien. This is David Attenborough turned on its head, where the animals are the voyeurs of human behaviours. The work shifts into theatrical Island of Doctor Moreau. A woman couples with a bear head and then becomes half human, half bear. Everything comes to life, and finally the men emerge from their bear suits, sweaty and naked, combing their hair and trying to blend in with cheap human suits. This moment marks the transition from the natural food chain into a social one: a man becomes a lion, hunting the weakest gazelle in the pack. The final transition is from the social food chain into a theatrical one. The two men who were bears and then uncomfortable humans become now the directors of the work. Webber & Millwood, key members of splintergroup (lawn, roadkill) co-directed a first draft season with PVC Tanz, the resident dance company at Theater Freiburg in Germany, in early 2009. They plan to finish the work in a final development, produced by PVC Tanz in collaboration with Performing Lines, in November 2010. Performing Lines will produce Australian seasons from 2011, in association with PVC Tanz. We are now seeking presenting partners for this exciting international co-production, for a January/February 2011 Australian premiere, and European seasons from March 2011. 5 Green Room Awards for Splintergroup’s lawn & roadkill: Roadkill, 3 Green Room Awards Dance category: • Best Concept & Realisation • Male Dancer (Grayson Millwood for Roadkill & Lawn) • Best Design (Mark Howett & Benjamin Cisterne for lighting) Lawn, 3 Green Room Awards Dance category: • Best Male Dancer (Grayson Millwood for Roadkill & Lawn) • Dance Ensemble Theatre (Alternative and Hybrid Performance) category: • Set and/or Costume Design (Zoë Atkinson)


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	"How many superlatives can you fit into one short review? This extraordinary dance work deserves them for its theatricality, choreography, performing skills and daring, sound, lighting - all combining to make this the best piece of dance as theatre seen in Sydney since Splintergroup was last here with lawn…" Jill Sykes, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20/3/09, on roadkill

	" Just as James Joyce created the great Irish novel while living abroad, now it seems a truly Australian dance-theatre masterpiece has emerged from the dour hinterhausen of modern day Berlin … It’s simply one of the best things you will see in the theatre … A series of physical and imaginative miracles." The Australian, 2005, on lawn

	"This is deeply exciting dance, physically thrilling (and sometimes even distressing in the anxiety you feel for the performers).... It's a passionate and unabashed exploration of masculinity - its aggression, its lostness, its danger, its tenderness, its hilarity - that makes you realise how exciting the smell of testosterone can be in the theatre. Through the physical language these men create, its wit and tension and brutality, emerges a profound tenderness, a lyrical delicacy and grace that is almost classical in its purity of movement. " Alison Croggan, Theatre Notes, 2009, on lawn