20:00, Fri 3rd – Sun 5th December 2021 at Main Lecture Theatre, Old Divinity School, St. John's College
Michaelmas Week 8 to Christmas Vacation

OMPHALOS is the latest piece from multi-disciplinary dance-theatre group Wringing Metamorphosis, taking place in the Main Lecture Theatre in the Old Divinity School.

OMPHALOS is a dance theatre piece devised from dreams and ancestral memory. In Ancient Greece, the ‘omphalos’ was a stone marking the navel of the universe; the piece is a journey towards and into that centre. The parallel archetypes of Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary move synergistically out of and back to Paradise. On our travels with them, we meet a bored housewife who transforms into a fox, twins trapped under ice, the messiah and a femme fatale at a Sicilian funeral wake, the Wailing Wall turned flesh in an act of holy surgery. Accompanied by ancestral Arabic, Sephardic, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish music (with a little Cyndi Lauper too), voice and body evolve through ritual, physical liturgy, and the construction and deconstruction of the world orbiting the unconscious, along a single axis.