Critical Path, with Performance Space, is thrilled to announce Jessie Rose McCall as the recipient of the 2024 Experimental Choreographic Residency.
Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand, Jessie is a pākehā movement artist whose choreographic practice searches for unexpected modes of queering – how might we generate newness in uncanny and life-giving ways, through acts of disruption? Interested in the collision of the mundane with the transcendent, she creates works that harness visual design, sound, and distinct movement vocabularies to build darkly humorous worlds that honour low-culture as a vehicle of the profound.
Jessie will be in the Drill Hall from 17 to 30 June engaging with the research for ‘Shred Event’ – a new multimedia performance work that queries what needs to be destroyed to make way for the new. The ritual destruction of outdated ways of being, both personal and communal, ‘Shred Event’ will encounter urgent questions around secrecy, public/private record, and the nature of political change, entwining this with the lived experience of queer motherhood, and the matrescence that can pull apart one’s known identity in order to re-configure in the profound role of parent.
In this process, Jessie will collaborate with fellow movement practitioner Sofia McIntyre and 2yr old Marcel Ngahuia Ziogas-McCall.
“The centering of queer, female and parenting bodies is itself corrective to dance’s own patriarchal ‘record’. Offering agency to my child within the research is itself an experiment in subverting hierarchical / dictatorial inclinations of western dance making. My child, alongside my mothering collaborator, brings the rich unknowns of transition and becoming, viscerally into the studio, as we investigate the nature of personal and political change.” – Jessie Rose McCall
ABOUT EXPERIMENTAL CHOREOGRAPHIC RESIDENCY
The Experimental Choreographic Residency (ECR) supports the development of innovative, bold and experimental approaches to choreography. Established in 2016 in partnership with Performance Space, the residency supports an artist or collaboration to spend two weeks developing their experimental choreographic practice with financial, production, technical and creative support from both organisations.
PAST ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
- 2023: Devika Bilimoria
- 2022: Brooke Stamp
- 2021: Rebecca Jenson
- 2020: Nat Randall and Anna Breckon
- 2019: Ivey Wawn
- 2018: Rajni Shah
- 2017: Atlanta Eke
- 2016: Justin Shoulder and Victoria Hunt
Image: Jessie Rose McCall by Jinki Cambronero
This program is supported through Create NSW.