Bock and Vincenzi

Frank Bock (performer/choreographer) and Simon Vincenzi (director/designer) have worked together since 1995. Together, through a series of uncompromising theatre/dance projects for both adults and children, they have explored the relationship between the language of movement and mystery of the image.

The work has had very clear conceptual origins, where memory, communication, time, the divided self, consciousness, death and disappearance have been recurring themes that have developed uncanny, evocative and intensely visceral stage worlds. Their works are based on ever-evolving ideas of isolation, observation, performance, transcription and translation with no predetermined outcome. During this time, the work has been developed with collaborators from a broad range of disciplines – both sighted and visually impaired performers, dancers and actors, artists with physical disabilities, sound and video artists, computer programmers, philosophers, photographers, poets, writers, a phenomenologist academic and a spirit medium. They have been drawn from England, Scotland, Norway, Armenia, Belgium and Brazil.

In previous series of works, the Forest Dance quartet and Breathtaking, extreme physical and visual worlds were developed which dealt, in part, with a complex re-telling of narrative structures. Subsequent phases of work have attempted to address the fear and complexity that presents itself when those structures are taken away – both for the performers and their audience. It was out of this premise that the concept of invisible dances… was born in 2000.