Through a spectacular joining of dance, voiceover, projection and light design, What Matters offers a dance theatre satire that highlights our economic reality and the cultural obsession with unsustainable growth.

What Matters developed as an artistic investigation into two key areas. One, the piece experiments with the dismembering of movement and sound delivery (as an homage to Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young and to the Japanese form of Bunraku). Two, the work examines how performance can dig into cultural conceptions of the economy. To do so, What Matters embraces the setting of a medical facility to riff on the media’s personification of the economy, in particular, how the ‘economy’ becomes an anthropomorphized figure that we are expected to care for in a deep and abiding manner. 

The work premiered in 2024 at the University of Calgary.