DIG 2025: Colette Sadler - The Violet Hour

'The Violet Hour' is a line from the poem The Waste Land by TS Eliot describing the sunset sky over London. This moment of temporal transition is reimagined in the performance The Violet Hour by Colette Sadler as the merging of real and digital realities. In this work, the real time and space of theatre is submerged in the fictional reality of immersive 3D digital video and light.  

Intertwining dance, song and digital video, the work consists of three distinct episodes. Each one is driven by one of the three performers around thematics of love, de-creation and transformation.  Moving between real and digital realms, it proposes a surreal exploration of the relationship between humans and our surroundings, stretching the notion of how we are both influenced by and implicated in the changing ecologies around us.

The performers are set in a landscape at a fictional 'end point' inspired in the mythological texts of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where human origins are founded in stone.

The choreography equips the performers with the imaginary of a futuristic body with heightened sensory awareness, connection and empathy with and for the silent and mysterious organic world around them.  This dance work asks: Can new figures and narratives be found that stand in opposition to humanity's self-destructive drive and the natural disasters that result? And what intimacies, bodies and desires could these hybrid beings of plant life and human produce?

In a time when our relationship with the natural world is urgently shifting in ungraspable ways, The Violet Hour attempts to offer new phytopoetic mythologies in motion. This new work is an attempt to offer a potential future toward a more sensually entangled interdependence with the natural world.

ACCESS: Audio described, Highly Visual / No or Little Text, Touch Tour Box available

CREDITS

Produced by Feral and Colette Sadler/ Stammer productions
Funded by Creative Scotland and NPN Co-Production Dance Fund

Artistic Direction and Choreography : Colette Sadler
Performance: Leah Marojevic, Samir Kennedy and Maëva Barthelot
Set and Lighting concept : Veli-Ville Siven
Video Design: Alexander Pannier
Lighting Design: Benny Goodman
Sound Design : Samir Kennedy
Object Design :  Zephyr Liddell
Fabrication: Ben Ashton, Catriona Carlton, Anna Orton, Barbra Kolasinski and Jen Kilgour.
Dramaturgy : Maxwell McCarthy
Produced by Feral (Kathryn Boyle & Jill Smith)
Kim Walz: Production Assistance
Choreographic Assistance: Roseann Dendy and Mark Bleakley

The Violet Hour is a co-production with Tramway/Dance International Glasgow (Glasgow), Tanzhaus NRW (Düsseldorf), Charleroi Dance (Brussels), and Tanztendenz (Munich). Supported by Scottish Dance Theatre (Dundee), The Work Room (Glasgow), Battersea Art Centre (London), Goethe Institute and Festival De Marseille (Marseille) / British Council UK/France Spotlight “Imaginons Ensemble.”

Photo Camille D. Tonnerre