About

In the global event of rapacious consumption, it is evidently unethical, as an artist, to work with toxic material or dwindling natural resources. In this climate, working with the physical body as material can be considered an ecological and political act. My practice-based research focuses on the body as a site of investigation within the cross-disciplinary field of contemporary art and dance. I will trace the canon of women–artist–dancers that used dance to construct meaning and challenge dominant representations of the body. Through a primarily feminist discourse, the body engaging with dance will be analysed as a body that performs the defining ideas of the time. I will argue that the physical body negotiates and reflects the ideologies in which it is situated and therefore can motivate alternate translations of representation. As a filmmaker I look to the context of dance as a generative site of contestation. I will focus on somatic practices, movement practices that involve a dual observation by the dancer; they are simultaneously aware of their gesture and the feeling of that gesture. The term somatic, from the word Soma, is the body as perceived from within. I will approach this interior territory to critically dispute the language of the sensing physical body. I will explore movement practice that turns the sensing body inside out to perform aesthetics of feeling and in turn perform political agency. Through this research period I will return to the self-organised dance institutions of Yvonne Rainer, Noa Eshkol and Anna Halprin. I will trace the lines of connection between these women; how they confronted language with bodies, evolving alternate subjectivities through live performance and written score.