DV8's Can We Afford This: The Cost of Devising on Site for Global Markets

Abstract

London-based DV8 Physical Theatre makes company-devised hybrid dance/theatre performance which consistently is socially committed, exploring the power dynamics of different forms of social inclusion and exclusion. The company's 2000 show, Can We Afford This, focused particularly on social prejudice about ‘the body beautiful’. Using seventeen dancers of different physical and technical abilities, ages, genders, and sizes, the show both critiqued prejudices about what constitutes the body beautiful and posited other, more inclusive, images of beautiful bodies. This analysis considers how the show's argument was focused and enhanced in its original context of devising and production (Sydney, Australia, in its Olympic and Paralympic year of 2000) and, in contrast, was dissipated and generalized when it moved out of that context to tour to the international markets of London and Hong Kong.