Joy(ce)

In 2006, the body of Joyce Carol Vincent was found in her London flat nearly three years after she had died, her TV still flickering. New Kyd’s solo Joy(ce) attempts to dance this absence: to trace what it means to vanish while visible.

The piece unfolds as a fugue of solos, moving between rupture and ritual, meditative movements and stillness, mourning and invocation. New Kyd channels muses across time and style, Isadora Duncan’s abandon, Graham’s rituals of sadness, Wigman’s whimsy, Billie Holiday’s vulnerability. Joy(ce) reflects the architectures of visibility and erasure around womanhood from a hauntologist* perspective.

Joy(ce) is a choreographic séance that presents Joyce as a symbolic figure of spectral resistance**. A meditation on solitude, memory and the shimmering echoes of those like Joyce Carol Vincent who slip away unnoticed. But revived through reminiscence.

*Hauntology: A theory where the present is haunted by "lost futures" of the past
**Spectral Resistance: using ghostly figures as a metaphor for resistance to power