Metabolizer is a free, interactive performance installation live at 37 Looe Street in Plymouth from 5 Feb – 11 March. It explores economic growth and exhaustion through data – and more, and more, and more dancing. 

Here’s how it works: a slick office meeting pod welcomes solo dancers. No experience necessary – simple instructions and a selection of tunes help get things started. The dance is then transformed into (anonymous) data via motion capture, fed directly into a database and then onto a dashboard display outside the pod, via closed loop. No dancing is ever visible – instead, the data is the virtuoso, with the goal of growing the dance-time by 3% each day until it reaches 12 hours. This goal echoes the annual growth rate target for GDP and the typical length of a working day for a sweatshop worker or cobalt miner, whose cheap labour fuels the growth economy. 

Created by Julia Pond, Metabolizer responds to both the impossibility of infinite economic growth on a finite planet and her own experience of limitation and invisibility through chronic hip pain and surgeries. The title refers to Marx’s concept of metabolism: the co-transformation of human and nature through labour. As a free performance installation, it invites residents of Plymouth to explore these ideas in their own time, and to dance more, and more, and more.

Accompanying Metabolizer is a performance mini-series called Optimizer! Each invited artist’s work responds to different facets of the installation, forming another focus for dialogue and dancing. 

Key dates: 

THURSDAY 5 Feb 6-9pm OPENING event. Come mingle and metabolize. 

WEDNESDAYS 11, 18, 25 Feb, 4, 11 March: Optimizer! Series, 6-9pm. Performances, films, bar, mini-dance parties. Full programme below and at this link.

WEDNESDAYS THROUGH SATURDAYS Metabolizer is open for YOU to come and dance, to help to produce more and more and more dance, and to watch the data grow. Opening hours will grow over the course of the installation in order to accommodate more production, but beginning with core hours 10am – 4pm. 

Invest! https://tinyurl.com/metabolizer

The first 100 investors contributing a minimum of £10 will have their names listed on the wall and receive an unspecified share of equity in the final amount of dance produced – plus a free glass of wine at the opening party or an Optimizer event.  

Optimizer! A free series of Wednesday evening events with invited consultant-artists presenting eye-opening takes on related themes, with drinks and nibbles available for purchase. These are intended to punctuate and animate the installation period. 

Optimizer! Programme:

Metabolizer has been developed through Julia Pond’s PhD Research at Kingston University London, funded by an AHRC/TECHNE studentship.