Australian and Taiwanese artists started their online residency by filming introduction videos where they talked about their practice and then met online together.
For their second session they had online group meetings, shared their dinner/lunch and discussed about common interests and future collaborations. After this session they recorded videos covering unknown parts of their practice that they chose to share with each other.
For the third session, artists developed tasks to work on a score or a text, images, or any other format they chose. In August they shared the outcome of these tasks with each other in their own way of documentation and medium.
Artists met online on the 18th of October 2021 for their last session together. In the first part of this session with the direction of Critical Path 2021 Research artist Alice Weber, artists worked together on an activity by reflecting with writings, images, links, and moving in an online spreadsheet. This activity was inspired by Alice’s ongoing research project Dream Cellscapes. For the second part Critical Path Digital- Artist Curator Matt Cornell created an online island in Gather Town. Artists created their own avatars and were asked to work on a digital choreography or create a score and share this with their peers while on the online island.
From October 2020 to October 2021, Critical Path is working with HORSE and Bare Feet Dance Theater (Mauvais Chausson) in Taiwan for an online residency exchange between Australian and Taiwanese artists.
The intention is to create the basis of bilingual materials exploring the artists’ practice for English and Chinese speaking audiences and face-to-face collaborations in the future.
Participating artists (Australia): Kristina Chan & Timothy Ohl, Stella Chen, WeiZen Ho, and Strange Attractor (Adelina Larsson & Alison Plevey)
Participating artists (Taiwan): Chen Wu-Kang, Su Wei-Chia, Yeh Ming-Hwa, Lin I-Chin
Facilitated by Claire Hicks (Critical Path), Wen Huang (HORSE) and Chien Chingtzu (HORSE)
ARTIST BIO
Kristina Chan & Timothy Ohl
Kristina is a dancer and choreographer based on the Mid North Coast NSW Australia. Through choreography and dance Kristina makes performance work that explores notions of impermanence, fragility and mortality in nature, humanity and our environment. Collaborating with artists in sound, light and visual design to create an environment for the dance to occur within, Kristina’s work is palpable and visceral.
Timothy Ohl is a multidisciplinary artist making performance work merging dance, text, voice, live music & visual design. His work takes a personal, magnified, dark comedic stab at topical popular culture as he aims to shine light on social fads that distract us from having & voicing our truthful opinions.
Stella Chen
Stella Chen is a gender fluid migrant settler from Taiwan, who arrived in Australia in 2009 as a seasonal worker. They are currently residing and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal lands of the Eora nation. They are an intersectionality practitioner, an alchemist and a performance artist, a researcher and a bog wonderer. They hold process-led multidisciplinary art practice and explore the legacy of my lived experience with post-memory, intergenerational trauma and resilience in both the settler colonial nations, Australia and Taiwan. Their interest art practice resides in the fields of performance and installation art, ecology and environmental humanities, in particular wetlands ecology, agriculture and settlement. Their bodily art practice is an offering to hold space for vulnerability, transience and ephemerality.
Weizen Ho
WeiZen is a Performing Artist and Deviser who brings together phonic-vocals and movement. Her performances transform and extend mundane postures, sounds and everyday objects or speech into poetic prayer. She excavates linguistic processes searching out their connection to identity. Her work also draws upon a lineage of Chinese immigrants who have lived for several generations in Melaka (Malaysia) and Java and extends it to her status as an Asian immigrant in Australia.
Strange Attractor (Adelina Larsson & Alison Plevey)
Strange Attractor, created by Adelina Larsson & Alison Plevey, is a platform and lab for artists to deepen artistic methodologies and strengthen critical discourse in experimental and emerging practices. It operates as an interface between the artists as collaborative peers and their audiences/publics to develop new languages for artistic practice and insight to artistic research.
Adelina Larsson is a Swedish/Mexican choreographer, curator, producer, performer and educator. She trained at DOCH, Stockholm and CODARTS, Rotterdam. Since moving to Australia in 2007 she has choreographed and performed for performing arts companies presenting at Melbourne International Arts Festival, Federation Square, Sydney Opera House, The State Theatre Centre of WA, Australian Institute of Sport, The Canberra Theatre Centre, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), The Lock Up, Newcastle and Fremantle Arts Centre. She recently completed her affiliation with Critical Path as Associate Artist (2017-2019) and is currently the co-director of ReadyMade Works.
Alison Plevey is an award-winning dance and physical theatre artist and performance maker. In 2016, Alison Plevey founded Australian Dance Party. Core to her practice is youth dance, initiating multiple projects in her home town of Bathurst/Central West with her collaborator Adam Deuisen (Lingua Franca) and working closely with QL2 Dance as a choreographer, teacher and education manager since 2010. She has a conceived of over 30 projects in the ACT and Regional NSW largely driven by place and playfully inspiring thinking, action and change around urgent issues of our time through the universal communicator – the moving body.
Chen Wu-Kang
CHEN Wu-Kang is the Artistic Director of HORSE. Born and raised in Taiwan, he began studying dance at the age of twelve and graduated from the Taiwan University of Arts. In 2001, Wu-Kang danced with Feld’s Ballet Tech and Peridance, he became the soloist the next year and started his long-term collaboration with choreographer Eliot Feld. In 2004, he co-founded HORSE as an Artistic Director, significant works include Velocity (2007), Bones (2008), 2 Men (2012) which toured in Asia, US and Europe.
Su Wei-Chia
SU Wei-Chia is the Director of HORSE. Born 1981 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, he was trained at National Taiwan University of Arts and enlightened by Professor WU Su-Fen. Later in 2004, SU established HORSE for which he performs and creates new works. In addition, SU is involved in various cross disciplinary projects. Such projects include the public art installation curated by LuxuryLogico and funded by Tapower Co.; ArtCross projects initiated by Middlesex University and other institutes around the world; choreography and movements direction for the theater works by Hong Kong director Edward Lam; and choreography for the openings of the 2009 Summer Deaflympics and the Universiade Taipei 2017.
Yeh Ming-Hwa
Ming-Hwa Yeh is a choreographer and dancer born and raised in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She received her BFA in Dance from Taipei National University of Arts (2006), National Theater of Taiwan presented her first work in (2008), as an emerging Taiwanese choreographer. She won the Creative Dance Competition, Creative Dance Award in Taiwan (2009). Her work has been presented nationally and internationally over the last decade.
Lin I-Chin
Born in Yunlin County in 1983, LIN I-chin is currently the artistic director of the Bare Feet Dance Theater. Lin cultivated her vision of choreography through long-term field studies of the local culture. With the intention to construct a unique style and method by using the physical body, Lin turned to theater as a medium to transform and re-create contemporary art. Lin has observed the nature of body movements through local culture, language, diet, environment, social history and other backgrounds. Having collaborated with the same group of professional and amateur dancers for many years, they work to find ways to exercise the body for the soul. Together, they dance and create, continuing a research and dialogue made to last.