Normal Dreams – Liana Zhen-Ai + Astrid Sonne

Pretty but Wicked presents Normal Dreams , a new performance by dancer Liana Zhen-Ai and musician Astrid Sonne. First presented as a part of the Pairings series at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York, curated and produced by Cameron Sczempka, now brought to London via Club Cheek and Qu Junktions. Expect never heard before songs, movement, noise, props and a video call from the big apple.

doors at 7 and performance at 8

About Liana Zhen-Ai

Liana Zhen-ai is a Brooklyn/London-based dancer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. She has performed as a soloist with choreographers Holly Blakey, Andrea Miller, and Akira Uchida. Her dancing has been featured in Vogue US, NOWNESS, and Face Magazine, and in venues including MoMA, Lincoln Center, Southbank Centre, and Théâtre Chaillot de Nationale.

Liana's work uses the lenses of new materialism and object-oriented ontology to interrogate shame, nature, and narrative. Her choreographic practice sits at the intersection of dance, dramaturgy, and scholarship, and her work has been presented at Prototype Festival, Amant, Center for Performance Research, and Green-Wood Cemetery in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic.

A bout Astrid Sonne

Astrid Sonne is a Danish, London based composer and viola player. Throughout her acclaimed discography, Astrid Sonne has been carefully crafting different moods through electronic and acoustic instrumental endeavours. On her most recent album Great Doubt (January 2024) this skill is refined, now with the distinct addition of the composer's own vocal in the fore. The tone of each track is unmistakably Sonne's, structured around contrasts through an impeccable sense of timing.

Lyrics on the album are sparse, merely highlighting different scenes or emotional states of being, leaving the music to fill in the blanks. Yet they also form a pattern of ambiguity, consolidated through the album title, searching for answers through looking at how and what you are asking, questions for the world, questions of love.