Tomorrow I begin a week’s residency at Dance Hub SA as part of their 2020 Artist Residencies program. What perfect timing, emerging from a couple of months of revisiting the archives and reflecting on possible new directions, to have a studio space all to oneself to dance, write and reflect, film and edit! And thanks to the support of a National Assistance Program for the Arts grant from the Myer Foundation I can also interact with my interstate and international dance colleagues with my new online capable equipment!

My project “Yesterday’s Skeleton—a self-portrait” will develop recorded materials for a documentary/bio pic—a physical etching on dance as a life practice and life as a dance/screen practice. Through an interrogation of my current practice and an historical unpacking of my dance trajectory, I hope to bring issues of body, sustain/ability, independence and community cooperation to the surface. I began this project (again thanks to Dance Hub SA) during my Mind The Gap residency at the Tasdance studio in Launceston last October 2019. There I began sifting through some archival material and experimenting with ways to physically re-engage and reframe it in relationship to today’s bodies…my body and those of a present day audience.

Here are a couple of the artefacts that came to the surface in Tasmania

So Sari — reflecting on my cross-cultural exchange in India that began in 2006

Anthony’s Bones — acknowledging how, as artists, we can transform trauma into creative calm

Over the past 2 months, in COVID isolation, I started recording some sequences from my contemporary dance technique archive—a huge repertoire of sequences that I have delivered to hundreds of other bodies over the past 30 odd years (refer to my recent post titled “Dance with Dianne—COVID19 Creative Strategies”). Not only did my own body memories of that material and where I was when I made it come to the surface, but those other bodies I shared it with got back in touch and let me know how it resonated for them and their bodies then and in the present. Even across the distance of time and location it is possible to feel sensation! So I will start there and see where it takes me…stay tuned…