Annie, Annie, Annie.

2025
 
A solo work by Rosamund Philpott
Sound Design: Hannah Lynch

Lighting Design: Sean Curnham

Costume & Set Design: Rosamund Philpott

 

Shed 2, Corbans Estate, Auckland, November 2025

 

This work began with a fragment: on Christmas morning in 1901, Annie Pollock, an accomplished pianist newly arrived from Glasgow, was found at the bottom of a cliff in the back blocks of Tairāwhiti, Aotearoa. This event, both intimate and distant, becomes the generative rupture from which a dance unfolds. Annie is at once an ancestor, myth, and vibrant material, the reverberation of her tragic death producing a temporal blur where the boundaries between the historical and speculative become entangled. 

 

The work weaves together an assemblage of personal narratives and cultural artefacts - Little Orphan Annie, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas - to produce a recursive, unstable figure of “Annie”. Annie becomes multiple: real and fictive, maternal and orphaned, falling and propelling. Her multiplicity queers the authority of the straight genealogical line and the body becomes a site where histories are not simply recalled but felt, unsettled, reworked, and reanimated.