MadDoG

Inspired by a practice of lace work, whose origins lie in ancient knotting/net-making, MadDoG is a knot where dissonant notions/materials are tied together. Together with textile designer Elena Vloeberghen, dancer and choreographer Lydia McGlinchey has developed several large-scale lace works in collaboration with the Texture Museum in Kortrijk through which knotting is brought onto the stage in an expanded sense. The knot doesn’t only unfold choreographically, however, but through the use of symbolic objects, spoken text, and music as well. McGlinchey understands expression and movement to be inseparable: the body is always ‘charged’, never devoid of sensation or emotion.

Thematically, the performance embodies the extreme disparities of contemporary experience where depictions of mass murder follow job ads and photoshopped women on yachts follow portrayals of natural disaster. This encounter with tightly bound contradictions is where McGlinchey sees knotting as a pertinent aesthetic stake. The confrontation with contrasting sentiments marks us all. The work destabilises beauty with grimness, taking on the figure of a rabid dog, thus challenging the binary logic of ‘Utopia’ vs ‘No Future’. 

MadDoG takes from the gothic genre by understanding the human as a site of perversion and deterioration. Staging desire as ‘astrayed’, the performers seek to become objects, generic surfaces stripped of context. The gothic genre has always been fascinated with the prospect of undermining the ‘true/authentic’ self. MadDoG understands the alleged ‘fakeness’ of the contemporary subject as a material reality. The fake has real consequences. Influencers have influence. Working through the Gothic by staging crude, fragmentary, and warped forms, the work seeks to leave audiences with what the artist calls ‘sublime horror’, inducing both wonder and fear at the same time. 

• Lydia McGlinchey was born in Australia and is currently living in Brussels, where she studied at P.A.R.T.S. She is a dancer and performance maker, making her own scenography with self-woven textile pieces. Lydia previously collaborated with Alix Eynaudi on her project Noa+Snow, with Simon Van Schuylenbergh on his project Ne Mosquito Pas, she performs in The Honey House by Nathan Ooms and is part of the German Staatstheater project. Kaaitheater presented her previous piece, Feral, in February 2023.