Battersea Arts Centre will welcome artists Jo Fong and George Orange for a three-week run of show The Rest of Our Lives this June.
Hopefully hopeful, The Rest of Our Lives is a cabaret of life and near death. A joyful dose of dance, circus and games. Two middle-aged lives come together in an eclectic, spontaneous, predictable and random decline. Jo is an old dancer, George an old clown. They are international artists with 100 years of life experience between them, armed with a soundtrack of floor-fillers and a sprinkling of eco-friendly optimism. It’s the beginning of the end, but they’re still here.
Jo and George have long histories of performing, Jo as a dancer and George as a street/circus artist – how could this possibly work? Together they have presented The Rest of Our Lives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Ageless Festival. Yorkshire Dance, Machynlleth Comedy Festival, The Place Theatre, London, Dance House, Cardiff, Chapter Arts Centre, and seven village halls across England. Previous audiences have described it as “one of the most joyful, celebratory and hilarious experiences of my life” and “quite possibly one of the best things I’ve ever experienced”.
Conceived before the pandemic, its exploration of the body and the chemistry of being together has found new resonance as we negotiate coming back together after so long. Sensational in all senses of the word, the audience are drawn in as Jo and George playfully shift the performance to a wider focus and ask the question – how are we all thinking about The Rest of Our Lives?
Talking about the show’s inspiration, Jo said: “The show was commissioned by Rural Touring Dance Initiative. Certainly, both me and George were curious about how a collaboration would go. We work in different fields yet there’s a commonality in how we work or rather play in spontaneity, liveness and in relation to audiences. In fact, the show was created in grief, way before the global grief we now have upon us, and death certainly puts a few things into perspective. There’s been loss but I think both me and George were exploring how we hoped to live. I’ve been totally overwhelmed by the responses to these performances. It seems to be tapping into our mutual navigation of this “post COVID” era.”
