All articles tagged: Dancehouse

A Score for Another Day

For the last two years, I have been writing rather public reflections every four to six weeks. Reflections on my practice – art making, love, life – propelled by the need to (re)claim a narrative as I navigated the early days of the end of my marriage; that charting time was a way to process; and subsequently a recognition that this journey needed to be witnessed. Read more...

“De-screen” Your Body

The goal of this score is to “de-screen” our body and our bodily movement. We are spending so much time directing our attention and our energy towards screens on endless Zoom and Skype calls. This kind of work causes us to make ourselves smaller and to squeeze our bodies, our focus and our energies into a flat square, through a tiny lens. This score is designed for us to re-find our three-dimensionality and the expansive potential of our bodies and movement. Read more...

The Avoca Project: Propositions and provocations for an uncertain Future

Norie asked “What are you waiting for exactly?” “To discover what it is that I am doing here”, I found myself saying. I had realised that all of the actions to date had been diversions, distractions, undertaken to reassure others that something was happening. All those artworks, the many residencies for other artists, the historically sound and environmentally experimental repairs to the buildings and grounds, the community projects I had led were really all part of waiting… Read more...
and

The Long Walk – Philipa Rothfield in conversation with Paul Briggs

It’s the relationship of power and influence. You’re an exploitable commodity in team structures, in societal structures. That people will use your talents to achieve an outcome for their goals. I think an Aboriginal football club is different to an Aboriginal player. It has more strength, it has more power, it has more visibility. It’s not as easily exploitable. I think it then starts to tackle institutional racism. I think that there’s a long way to go for AFL or Cricket Australia or Netball Australia or other sports bodies to be able to embrace and to protect the culture and identity of indigenous players. Read more...

Diary entries

The thing is: marginalised communities exist to a certain extent as discreet ecosystems. We are symbiotic. We are bioregional. And, like any ecosystem, we are vulnerable to exploitation and degradation. What am I trying to say here? I guess, maybe: don’t trade your life in the forest to become a fucking pot-plant. Especially now that we have never been so tradeable. We have never been so identified as a commodity. It’s unprecedented. This has its advantages: we can make a fucking living, for one thing. Read more...

Notes on a Secretive Dance Event

The Secretive Dance Team creates site-specific live performances incorporating urban and natural landscapes and found interiors into expansive if enigmatic dance dramas full of strenuous and fantastical posturing and passages of anarchy. Miracle in Aisle 6 was the group’s third production, it was performed only once, and was not supported by any funding or presenting organisation. And it was free. Read more...

Critical Choreography: Embodying a safe, democratic space

We all know and recognise the pattern: strong alpha male in powerful position vis-a-vis a young female just stepping into the scene, hoping to carve a path of her own. My investigation into this delicate issue addresses a specific context – Indonesian contemporary dance practice – and asks to what extent is this disturbing misconduct conducted in the name of – and embedded within – current forms of choreographic practice? Read more...

The Labour of the Many – Staging the Few

Whose bodies are we seeing today in mainstream spaces? Whose aesthetics are dominant? Whose history occludes and makes invisible the labour of immigration and the absence of certain racialised borders that helped consolidate modern and contemporary dance practices today? How can those in power share the spaces and resources with the many in the margins? What can an attention to the historical assembly of all these flows, stoppages, and movement invite us to consider as we move forward? Read more...