Make Your Life Count | Sarah Aiken

Loosen your sense of self in a kaleidoscopic dance work of constantly shifting scale. Are you too much to handle or too small to matter?

Make Your Life Count is an ambitious dance work that shifts scale in a heartbeat, from the microscopic to the universal. Choreographer and dancer Sarah Aiken encounters her own self expanded to infinite proportions or shrunken to painful insignificance, stretched into new dimensions or flattened into mute landscapes. This powerful feat of imagination is a serious attempt to grapple with the paradoxes of modern life, in which the individual is swollen to grotesque importance while also reduced to an ineffectual, even invisible impotence.

Whether monstrous and destructive or lost in the crushing scale of humanity, ecology, time and the universe, this perspective-shifting work is a chance to lose yourself, and maybe find something better instead.

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“one of the most moving pieces of dance ... blurs the line between performance and documentation, using an onstage camera to create, minimise, expand and extrapolate her image in real time. she critiques the constant performance of identity demanded by techno-capitalism and asks us to indulge in our own insignificance” - Anador Walsh, The Saturday Paper

“Her body becomes a sculptural object… beautifully wrought, an exercise in simplicity and innovation.” – Varia Karipoff, RealTime

“Aiken’s work is a delight with its own personality, fully engaged with wit and visual-verbal wordplay.” – Liza Dezfouli, Australian Stage 

“…a definitional, capstone work of the emerging generation of Australian choreographers.” – Jana Perkovic, The Age

​ABOUT

Sarah Aiken is a Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer whose work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy & exchange. Work includes Make Your Life Count (Arts House 2022), Demake (STRUT/TURA 2022), Piece (for pieces) (PIECES. LGI/The Substation. 2019), Light, colour and quiet conversation (TO MAKE TO DO/Neon Park, 2018), SARAH AIKEN (Tools for Personal Expansion)(Keir Choreographic Award, 2016, Metro Arts 2017), SET (Dancehouse’s Housemate 2015, Dancemakers Toronto 2018), Three Short Dances (Les Plateaux de la Briqueterie. Paris 2015, Keir Choreographic Award, 2014). Video work has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Arts Sydney, Arts House, Dromana Drive In, Melbourne Fringe, and The Substation/FRAME: Biennial of Dance.

Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to create work that engages rigorously with participation, waste and a reckless formalism, recycling content to consider materiality and how we come together. Their works include What Am I Supposed To Do? (WAISTD)(Arts Centre Melbourne/ Melbourne Fringe Take Over! 2019), Underworld (Melbourne Knowledge Week 2019, Supercell 2017, Darebin Arts/Speakeasy 2017), Equinox (Castlemaine State Festival 2019), OVERWORLD (Next Wave 2014, Dance Massive 2015) and Deep Soulful Sweats (Ian Potter Museum 2019, Castlemaine Festival 2019, MPavilion 2018 and 2021, Brisbane Festival 2016, PICA 2017, Next Wave 2014, FOLA 2014, Dark MOFO 2014/15) and Upacara/Ritual (Dark MOFO 2015, with UTAS) and are currently developing The Eleventh Hour, an 11 hour participatory experience. 

Sarah was selected for the DanceWEB Scholarship Impulstanz, Vienna 2017, and in 2021 received the Creators Fund to develop her digital practice. In 2022 Sarah undertook a three-month residency at HIAP Helsinki, supported by Australia Council for the Arts and is a recipient of the Chloe Munro Independent Artist Fellowship. 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. Development supported by Lucy Guerin Inc/WXYZ space residency.