editorial

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...
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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...

My Issue with Japan

Although I love visiting Japan, it is no easy matter writing about Japanese culture. How can I put this? I write from the outside looking in. Like Commodore Perry, I enter the waters of Japan from far away. Although my intentions are not imperialistic as such, my understanding, perception and movement is informed by everyday norms which hail from somewhere else. These taken for granted habits of thought underlie the manner in which I encounter that which is different. They filter its perception, the perception of the subject presumed to know. And yet, the encounter is an event, the relational means whereby new modes of thought come about. We are no longer the same. Read more...

Bodily Activism

Bodily activism works on two fronts: it puts the body at the service of the political but it also activates the body. In so doing, the body becomes a political force. Activating the body is specific to each political context, which differentiates different kinds of body, the black body, the vulnerable body, the silenced body, the demonstrating body, the conspiratorial body. In each case, and in each activist situation, the body foregrounds itself, motioning towards social and political change. Such a body acts in concert with other bodies, with other like-bodies more often than not (but not always). 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...