Performance
Nincompoop
Performance · 2021–2023
A choreographic and political proposition shaped by awkward locomotion, comic failure, repetition, and embodied play.
Practice
Drawing on the physical comedy of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, the choreographic practice centred on exaggeration, awkward locomotion, and cartoon-like physicality. The studio process developed through playful improvisations that distorted everyday walking into eccentric patterns of movement, allowing disproportion, imbalance, and comic timing to become compositional material. Rather than pursuing technical virtuosity, the practice cultivated physical humour through repetition, interruption, and embodied play.
Concept
Nincompoop treats foolishness as a choreographic and political proposition. By embracing awkwardness, exaggeration, and comic failure, the work resists ideals of efficiency, virtuosity, and self-control that often shape both contemporary performance and everyday social behaviour. Instead, it proposes absurdity as a way of unsettling normative expectations of how bodies should move, behave, and be perceived.
Details
Premiere
Bonnie Bird Theatre, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance — 10 July 2023.