Janis Claxton

Janis Claxton Dance is an award winning contemporary dance company based in Edinburgh. The company creates choreographed works for touring and site specific performance events for unique spaces.

DanceDigital has commissioned two new works by Janis Claxton Dance, Human Animal and Humanimalia. The works challenge perceptions of who’s watching who in performance and expose performers and audience alike to the intrinsic evolutionary complicity between humans and animals.  Both works are inspired by the Janis’s on-going research into primatology.

Human Animal is a durational performance installation. The work evolves according to location and audience who, depending on their own particular human animal behaviour, became part of this unique installation.

Humanimalia is a thought provoking and moving full length work portraying universal themes that are inherent in all primates through a revealing journey of submission, dominance, repression and revelation. With a unique sound score composed by Phillip Pinsky (Grid Iron, Royal Lyceum Theatre), the performance takes place on and around a set of purpose designed Perspex boxes, the ‘human animals’ dancing in a seamless interaction between each other, audience, spacial confinement and video projection.

According to Janis, “with the view to engage audiences of a broad range, the works explore resonances with all humans and other primates through exploring gestures and behaviour patterns that inhabit all of our species as well as our closet relatives, the other Great apes. The works aim to engage audiences in questions and possibilities about our place in the world, and to challenge the current predisposition that humans are superior to all other life on earth.”

For more information on the artist visit http://www.janisclaxton.com/