Pedestrian Guiiidance

Kosta Bogoievski & Josie Archer

(Ōtautahi / Christchurch)

21 February 2024, 7-9.00pm
22 February 2024, 2-3.30pm and 5-8.00pm

In this roaming dance work, the performers come equipped with retractable barrier belts that extend beyond their bodies to walls and each other to create temporary barriers. Pedestrians are re-orientated to engage in site and performer-audience relationships in new ways. Catch the performers roaming the waterfront becoming caricature technicians busy with obfuscating and making a spectacle of the everyday choreography of foot traffic and injecting dance into areas of the site that require it. The work rubs up against urban landscaping and a city’s constant flux of progress. Visible markers and signs as well as invisible codes of behaviour determine how one finds themselves walking from A to B.

Pedestrian Guiiiiidance uses a dancer’s approach to the city as a site of play to interrupt the utilitarian flow of functional movement and pathways as departure point for dance and choreography. The work was commissioned by the Festival of Transitional Architecture (Ōtautahi Christchurch) in 2018. Since then it has been performed at the Performance Arcade in 2020 and the Auckland Arts Festival in 2022. This year’s performance expands the work from a duet to five performers all equipped with retractable belts to build on the work’s capacity to shape and shift the heavy foot traffic of the waterfront.