UnFoldings

In 2021, I was invited to curate the festival Dance in Vancouver, presented biannually by The Dance Centre. I was in Melbourne Australia, in lockdown after lockdown after lockdown while Vancouver was making a very slow return to a new ‘normal’. Time was slow too, or so it seemed. And it is so that there was time at last to have long and slow conversations with dance artists; artists friends I knew well based in Melbourne and artists I was becoming friendly with, based in Vancouver. Read more...

Issue #12 WHAT NOW? Vol. 1 Interior Lives – Scores for Confined Times (A collection)

For this volume we have invited dance and movement practitioners to propose a ‘score’ – an invitation to form new linkages through the body, and with other bodies; to creatively engage new ways of living and moving in confined environments but not only; to creatively explore inner life and external space; and to rethink the everyday in choreographic terms. Read more...

In the pursuit of ma

Time flows differently in all things Japanese. In January/February 2019, I was the lucky recipient of a Saison Foundation Fellowship for Arts Managers. This is one of the very few artist-modelled residence opportunities offered to us, arts worker, non-artists. The Saison Foundation founder, Seiji Tsutsumi, owner of the Saison Group, established the foundation with his own funds in 1987. Behind the extraordinary philanthropist was a writer and poet known under the pen name Takashi Tsujii. The vision of the foundation was to reinvigorate the creative soil of Japan by opening it up to international cultural exchange in order to regain international perspective. Soft diplomacy before it became hype. True philanthropists before they became commodified. Read more...

What Matters

‘What Matters’ was the last of a series of salon conversations as a part of the Xavier Le Roy _In Dialogue public program, co-presented by Dancehouse with MPavilion. The conversations aimed to link dance and choreography to current issues in art and society; highlighting the connections between the thinking, moving body and contemporary aesthetic, cultural and political issues. Led by Angela Conquet, Artistic Director of Dancehouse, Xavier Le Roy was joined by a panel of local practitioners such as choreographer Matthew Day and Joeri Mol – senior lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Melbourne; as well as French artist Mathieu Brand. Read more...

On the Pursuit of What Matters

With this issue in mind, we wanted to take a closer look at the realities of those working with ephemeral time-based processes and products. In a money-driven world, the performing arts are equally subjected to market rules – specifically those of commodification and consumerism – like any other field of practice. And yet, with no tangible object to trade except the experiential moment of the now, should the embodied performative event be a commodity traded like any other? Read more...