Stockholm Fringe Festival 2015 - winner of the Stockholm Fringe Festival Young Stoff Award.

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Coegi harbours creativity and energy in equal lengths. Engaging and cleverly presented with full confidence. UK's got talent!

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The Place Resolution 2015

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In Rural Living Grace Nicol lines up a dozen apples on the floor, moving them about in an orderly way while Theo Samsworth’s dancing stirs his memories of a Herefordshire orchard. But his fellow performers deny him the satisfaction of verbally sharing them. The two musicians finally scatter crates of apples over the stage, the fruit now symbolising reminiscences that were not valid because no one else could remember them.

 

Claire Cohen

 

 

An uneasy mix of the funny and the sad, Rural Living is an original and unusual performance. The discomfort felt at the beginning through the awkwardness of the perfomer, is mirrored by the discomfort felt at the end - caused by the performer's defiance in a flowing pink wig, confronting the lit-up audience. Live sound is performed on stage adding a further dimension to the piece, giving a rich sense of creation and collaboration. Rural Living explores personal memory connected to place and the inability of truly sharing this memory with others, however for me it also spoke about social anxiety and the difficulties in human connection. Though this results in a piece with very dark undertones, its tongue in cheek attitude leaves you feeling uplifted.

 

Liadain Evans

 

 

This is the debut work from young inter-disciplinary company, Coegi, whose holistic approach to making dance work is as refreshing and exciting as it is painstakingly layered and considered. Here onstage, the workings of the piece as a whole – from the integration of live musical performance, to the use of the performers’ own memories, to acknowledgement of a very present and changing context – are given equal weight, consideration and importance to the movement material itself, the overall composition proving that great choreography is about much more than just throwing together a few impressive dance moves.

 

The deeply layered nature of the work and the exposure and acknowledgement of these layers jolts the audience into recognising that our own perception of the performance is marred by the unreliable yet inescapable history that followed each one of us into the auditorium. Wilfred Petherbridge and Ben Hauke’s performance of a live score adds a further layer of exposure, turning live sounds and happenings into disjointed memories before our ears. Coegi is supposedly Latin for ‘bring together’ - something that, through the seamless integration of both dance and music performance live onstage, the company really excels at.

 

So much dance work in the UK centres around performers as objects, nothing more than finely tuned, technically skilled extensions of the (often male) choreographer’s ego. How refreshing, then, to see a company contending with some of dance’s perceived norms in an institution that prides itself as being at the forefront of new dance in the UK yet which often seems to go a long way towards the promoting and safeguarding of some of dance’s more archaic systems of operation (I note here, for example, that works presented at Resolution! must adhere to a traditional proscenium arch setup and performers are prohibited from entering the audience). This is 2015, after all. There are plenty of artists making work in similar ways, Coegi are hardly revolutionary. Why, then, does Rural Living appear to stick out on a limb next to the work it’s programed alongside? Why does it feel like some cobwebs have been rattled in a place I wasn’t sure they even existed anymore? With a little more time, distillation and direction, Coegi might just be able to blow some of those cobwebs away for good.

 

Holly Beasley- Garrigan

 

 

V2 Motus Platform

 

"The final scratch perfomance, at the V2 Motus work in progress platform, Rural Living was performed by trio Coegi. Choreographed by Grace Nicol, the piece explored the memories of performer Theo Samsworth's childhood and adolescence, growing up in Herefordshire, with third member, composer and musician Wilf performing live. Wigs, apples and a great deal of running, guided us through this piece of nostalgia, and looked to present a sense of collaboration, blurring the lines between choreographer, composer and performer. More abstract in parts than others, Rural Living presented the comic and bizarre alongside the dark and disturbing, and thoroughly entertained.'

 

 

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