Alan and WeiZen are performers, devisors and creators who investigate questions regarding interculturality, ceremony, embodied spaces, and methods of animation, inhabitation and activation. They work both individually and in collaboration.
In this project the artists will inquire how place may be engendered through community engagement and enactment. Their research process will focus on ways of devising social choreographies based on symbols that persist in each individual’s memory, kindling a recognition of essences that are timeless, intersecting the diverse beliefs that are held in the community. Concerned about the disappearance of rituals in our lives, they seek what is rememberable and remarkable in our societal and domestic spaces by bringing people, place and memory together.
Through their research they perceive rituals as symbolic practices that shift perception and bring people together in an alliance of wholeness and community. Employing walking and conversation as methods for exchange, they will be engaging with several communities to identify their significant symbols, images, materials and ways of observance and practice. By drawing out the notion of cultural inheritance and links to ancestral themes, they seek the body that extends beyond the skin and into the places we inhabit.
Alan and WeiZen will be working locally with social and cultural researcher, Anthropologist Dr. Phillip Mar (Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University). For the Australia-Asia exchange they are collaborating with Mella Jaarsma, an internationally recognised artist who has been resident in Indonesia since 1984. Her work features complex costumed performances and installations with a focus on forms of cultural and racial diversity. Their research counterpart in Yogjakarta, is Mira Asriningtyas, an artist, researcher, curator and art writer, who works with LIR Curator Collective.
Head to WeiZen’s artist website for more beautiful images and information of the the walks from both the Blue Mountains and Indonesia.