Sarah Aiken: Make Your Life Count

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

Make Your Life Count looks for ways to soften society’s focus on the individual – to lose oneself in the patterns of community, ecology and history. An award-winning solo, from one of Australia’s most exciting choreographers, is an ambitious work of scale incorporating dance, intricate pre-made and real-time video layering, text and the live body as it navigates digital and physical landscapes. Supported by an original sound score by long-term collaborator Andrew Wilson (aka Andras), Make Your Life Count pushes form, knitting together dance and projections with wry humour. 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.