I’ve just been informed that the very nice Arts Victoria have once again decided throwing money at me to make dance is a sensible idea. Yes, it is, and I can promise you more of the same.

So in September, I’ll be heading down under again for a quick development with several Chinese demons, a bunch of Taiwan Binlang girls, Emile Zile as the death metal master of ceremonies (kinda like Freddy Mercury invoking demon spawn), oh yeah, and several invocations of demons and their spawn, guest appearance by Alistair Crowley or his corpse, several beautiful dancers making a big mess, possibly lots of dirt and fake blood again… original ideas? nup, I’m here to make a mockery of myself.

hell is structured as two intertwining threads. One is the various models of death in contemporary society; the other is a decent through the levels of Dante’s Inferno. The models of death come from Jean Baudrillard’s book Symbolic Exchange and Death, which was the basis for my previous work, extermination. Whereas extermination examined the contemporary history of the body and identity, hell looks to death in its various contemporary guises –biological death, the accident and catastrophe, ‘natural’death, sacrificial death – as the means for creating identity and defining bodies. Parallel to this is Dante’s journey through the levels of hell, from limbo down to the lowest depths of the 9th circle. Between the two threads, I am attempting to examine the contemporary role of death and its historical implications and consequences for the living.