Alice’s adventures underground

The story of a little girl who enters a new world through a rabbit hole will be presented through a contemporary dance production next month.

Naupaca Dance Factory will present a dance interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (the original title of the handwritten manuscript) at the Aurora Opera House in Victoria on December 10.

The production will translate the story’s Victorian quest for the origins of selfhood into an exploration of the materiality of the body.

The project will attempt to bring to bear upon the story of Alice, the wandering female figure, postmodern theoretical accounts of identity and subversion.

In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the choreography will strive to articulate unspeakable desires as non-human, ahuman and post-human bodies are unveiled and enlivened.

Creating a choreographic response to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Naupaca Dance Factory will focus on passages of movement, accompanied by and structured around textual, visual and musicalmaterial.

The project will present dancers who will inhabit and identify with words and images, articulating through the body, through the ephemerality of dance, the literary and thesymbolical.

Avoiding the recognisable symmetry of classical ballet, or for that matter, of other existing dance forms, the choreography for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground will present technical skill and facility as a means through which the written can be transformed into the visual, and the fantastical actualised. This black-tie event features its own original music score and includes a cast of over 150 dancers.

This interpretation is directed by Joeline Tabone and choreographed by Tabone, Deborah Agius, Yosef Farrugia and Lara Vella.

Denise Buttigieg will dance the part of Alice, Deborah Agius the Cheshire Cat, Yosef Farrugia the Mad Hatter, Dorian Mallia the March Hare, Jasmine Buttigieg the White Rabbit, Sandra Grech the Caterpillar and Julia Camilleri the Queen of Hearts. Tickets available from the Aurora Box office, Victoria and Island Books, Mosta. To book, call 2155 9452 or 2156 2974. The show starts at 8 p.m. and doors open at 7.30 p.m.

Reservations can also be made from www.naupacadanceacademy.com. E-mail: contact@naupacadanceacademy.com.