Exile - an intercultural exploration of female subjectivity in a hostile and shifting landscape.  Images of female outcasts, vagrants, and nomads inform this work, which places the Japanese butoh body, in a sculptural, digitised environment.

Created by Mary Moore and Tomiko Takai, Exile performed at the Sydney Spring Festival 2000 and at the International Shanghai Festival 2000.

My search is to catch that momentary vacuum in the body after the wind passes through it. I select the season and take the clouds, the rain and the snow into my body. The smile of an old woman who has erased passion, becomes a stone or dew….I want to float like the seed of a dandelion. How do I dance? I cannot choose 'how' anymore. The choice never comes. All that is visible in the light I have left are the worn out soles of my feet.
Tomiko Takai

Moore has created a fluid electronic space to wrap Takai’s performing body.  She refers to it as a technological matrix:  “I use the word matrix because it is derived from ‘mater’ meaning both mother and womb.  It is an active containing space in which bodily transformations can occur. I have created this matrix, but paradoxically, the body it contains resonates with memories of my mother.

Tomiko Takai and Mary Moore with their collaborators, composer Stuart Day, video artist Richard Back, computer animator Paul Jennings, and dramaturg Julie Holledge, have combined the visual, the visceral and the aural to create a surreal, non-narrative work that evokes a dislocated state of being.

Exile was funded by Arts SA, Japan Foundation, Sydney Spring Festival. Shanghai International Festival.

This production is still available for performance.