The Real Imaginary

The Real Imaginary is a collection of dance scores for remaking reality through imagination. Each score is a filter, or lens, transforming perceptions of time, space and movement; each dance a portal to another order of sense-making. These practices, developed over the first two years of Charlie’s doctoral research, in collaboration with dancers Florencia Riverti and Qiao Lin Tan, draw on understandings of magic in and as performance, departing from both the colonial relegation of magic to the irrational and the exotic, and the neoliberal reappropriation of magic as individual empowerment and manifestation. The Real Imaginary, rather, invokes magic as an activity requiring no supernatural skill, only collectively pooled attention in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. Dances, and the feedback loops of perception they generate, become collective attempts to not only make sense of the senseless, but to re-imagine and re-construct reality entirely anew.

 

Work-in-progress sharing and discussion

with guests Nora Raine Thompson and Efrosini Protopapa 

 

Friday 10th April 2026 

7:30 pm 

Chisenhale Dance Space

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Free, booking required - link coming soon

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Following a sharing of The Real Imaginary, dancer and scholar Nora Raine Thompson (NYU) will give a short presentation on her current doctoral research into “impossible tasks” in dance. There will then be a discussion and Q&A facilitated by choreographer and researcher Efrosini Protopapa.

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