Shauna Elton's Amae was presented at EDAM dance as part of Convergence 2018 - A choreographic series featuring new work by Peter Bingham and guest artists Shauna Elton and Natalie Tin Yin Gan

Amae: No matter how wide she stretched her arms, the amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Chings universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve. -Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Performed by Shauna Elton, Emmalena Fredriksson and Kate Franklin.

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"Elton's Amae is a trio for Kate Franklin, Emmalena Fredriksson and the choreographer. It's a big-hearted, wide-limbed, joyous ode to bodily connection, mutual support, and psychic interdependence. The dancers run on stage in similar grey and red dresses, throw down various dance accessories (knee pads, socks, etc.), and then launch into a robust sequence of pushes and pulls and small lifts and jumps and limb-to-limb touching that combines some of the principles of contact with Elton's own contemporary vocabulary. There is, for example, a terrific moment in which Elton is carrying Franklin (or maybe it was the other way around), and Fredriksson, crouched on the floor, slides her hands between Elton's legs and beside her feet, as if giving her fellow dancer, now burdened with the weight of another body, directional guidance. Not that we don't also witness moments of tension and conflict in this piece. At one point Elton is lying on her side downstage while Franklin and Fredriksson work through who is leading and who is following whom in a series of toreador-like advances and retreats. The work concludes with the three dancers, having donned the accessories that had previously lain on the floor and simultaneously shed their outer grey frocks, in some senses becoming one single, hydra-headed body--an appropriate image for the gathering force of feminine energy and love that is at the heart of this dance."  - Peter Dickinson http://performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.com/2018/05/convergence-x-2-at-edam.html