Our Unspoken 2021

10 Nov 2021 : The Drill Hall, New Beach Road, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, NSW Australia

This project was a commission for The Dancing Sydney: Mapping Movements: Performing Histories Archive Project 2019. Through a series of Covid-related hiccups the project was completed nearing the end of 2021.

I was invited to work on an element of my personal dance history, but my current practice, whilst still body-focussed, is barely dance. So instead, I proposed a call-out to elicit responses from the broader performance community. I hoped we might collectively ask difficult questions about the balance between the personal and professional imperatives entailed in maintaining a practice and in belonging to an artistic community. This collective unspoken was to be a map of individual trajectories, rather than of works I have personally made. I hoped to unearth an even more fragile trace, that of the collective thoughts and unfinished sentences that pass amongst and between us, artists and audiences. Floating words about and in response to both performance and practice, the ends of things unresolved, discussions not completed. My callout became a broad question about experiences, thoughts, regrets.

My vision for the method of presentation was a sound installation set up in The Drill Hall to be experienced by visitors sitting in a circle of chairs. Due to Covidrestrictions I decided to make a video of just myself in an empty circle of chairs, an introductory monologue followed by a pastiche of contributed text and words.

Contributors (text and/or voice)

Rodney Berry, Sarah Breen-Lovett, Matt Cornell, Ari Ehrlich, Ira Ferris, Peter Fraser, Clare Grant, WeiZen Ho, Tom Isaacs, Naomi Horridge, Mike Leggett, Phillip Mills, Katia Molino, Margaret Roberts, Timothy Rushton, Peter McRae, Alan Schacher, Olivier Sidore, Dean Walsh, Gary Warner

Additional voices

Andrew Game, Deborah Pollard, Judi Moss, Nathan Robinson, Nick Strike

Video recorded in The Drill Hall, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, Australia.

Additional audio effects excerpt from Flow Motions by Rik Rue (1998).

The Dancing Sydney Archive Project was supported by City of Sydney in 2019 & 2020. This project is a part of the larger Dancing Sydney: Mapping Movements: Performing Histories, a collection of projects conceived by Amanda Card (University of Sydney), Erin Brannigan (University of NSW) and Julie-Anne Long (Macquarie University), in partnership with Critical Path.