The next two chapters chart the creation of the on-site performances. In Chapter 2: ‘Immersion’ the notion of ‘dancing as locating’ is put into practice as I explore my body’s sensory experience in relation to the site of the ‘Killeavy’ farm property, in my research and development of
Immersion/ Excursion: Killeavy. I experiment with weaving Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
ideas and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘smooth space’ into my perception of a place. The chapter discusses my choices for presenting the material of the site as I did: as a walking excursion, which included the audience as active participants in the place.
In Chapter 3: Blasted Away, I experiment with my locating practice in an urban setting: the city of Melbourne. From a squiggle on a rare map, I am led to create and perform Blasted Away at
Queen’s Bridge, where a waterfall across the Yarra had been an important crossing for the Kulin nation and also marked the site of first European landing in Melbourne by Grimes’, Batman’s and Fawkner’s parties in the 1800s.
Chapter 4: ‘Empty?’ explores questions pertaining to my methodology through an account of two workshops attended in Europe with Frank van de Ven and Miloš Šejn. Aspects of Body Weather training are described and interrogated in more detail, most significantly the notion of ‘emptiness’. Other important ideas and physical states that arose from the workshops included the ‘permeability’ of the body and the attempt to dance in relation to two places at once.
Chapter 5: ‘In Flux’ charts my experiences of place, body and identity as a traveler visiting European places that my ancestors came from and contemplating Australia from an antipodean angle. The intense familiarity I felt at certain sites contrasted with the experience of alienation in other places, became the subject of a short performance work entitled Foreign/ Familiar.
Chapter 6: ‘Still Landing’ and Chapter 7: ‘Sorry’ both refer to desert sites of the Northern Territory and to different aspects and stages of the development of the video work Still Landing.
Ken Gelder and Jane M Jacobs’ theorising of Freud’s notion of the Uncanny in relation to place in Australia accompanied my locating dances and re-locating process—the overlaying of
embodied memories from Europe onto the contrasting environment of Central Australia. Stephen Muecke’s commentary on Indigenous philosophy traveled alongside my journey with some Warlpiri people from Yuendumu to Lajamanu.
‘Sorry’ emerged after a personal experience of loss. The chapter moves from my experience of my body in grief in relation to (or absence from) place, to recognition of an underlying grief at the core of the nation. This chapter was written in the course of shooting, editing and creating the installation performance Still Landing, which was filmed on Warlpiri country at Puturlu, near
Yuendumu.
The locating dances and their performance outcomes are my attempt to engage with and articulate my experience of a number of Australian places selected as sites. My initial focus for this doctoral project was to explore my sensory dance of place amidst theories of human engagement with the non-human world and to make performance with an anti-anthropocentric intent. Within a year of undertaking this research, however, the discourse of cultural identity came to the fore of the project and remained there. Upon exploring the relationship of body and place in Australia, the fact that my very presence in this country is owing to the exploitations of colonialism became an inescapable issue (or an issue I chose not to evade). The locating dances and performance works that comprise Locating: Place and the Moving Body acknowledge the colonial history that
2. Immersion
To be immersed in place is to be surrounded by it, with a reduced sense of separation between one’s self-body and the surrounding world. This chapter explores the proposition of ‘dancing as locating’ in the bushland along the banks of the Yarra River and at the ruins of an old house and cattle farm property in Eltham, Victoria. It includes examples of physical experimentation with theory in the early stages of the research, as I explore Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ in my perception of a place. Arranged roughly chronologically, the chapter charts the various stages of research of the site (locating) and creation of the performance (audiencing). It considers modes of representation that might facilitate an immersive experience of place for an audience. It engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thoughts on ‘smooth and striated space’, as well as their description of ‘becoming’ in its relation to representation in performance.
Some writing in this section is an attempt to speak from within the experience of perceiving and dancing, as a continuation of the dance and the place—in this sense the written word itself aspires to ‘immersion.’ Via the interspersion of this descriptive-immersive writing from locating improvisations and information from historical and ecological research of the site, a discussion starts to emerge about knowledge and place. As a dancer and site-based performance artist, what I know or might perceive about a place involves intuition, sensation, feeling and imagination—all arguably subjective modes, in contrast to the ‘specialist knowledge’ I encountered through my research with historical societies and a local naturalist. In a sense these divergent ways of knowing actually produce, from one place, different places. This chapter considers the selection
and layering of information from these potentially incongruous sources.