Motion Picture takes the 1950 film noir classic D.O.A. as a choreographic score to explore the tensions between live performance and cinema.

The film opens with Frank Bigelow, a small-town everyman, reporting his own murder. He has been poisoned with a luminous toxin and with time running out, he is determined to find out why.

Caught between the living stage and the projected image, the audience is bathed in the flickering light of a screen mounted behind them. On stage, the dancers are both viewers and protagonists, using the cinematic elements as motivations for movement. The transference of information from one medium to another creates a physicalised abstraction of the moody aesthetic of film noir.

From the choreographer and director of Conversation Piece and Weather comes a surprising new work that both pays homage to the moving image and rebels against it.