In botany grafting is a horticultural practice in which a branch or bud of one plant is attached to the stem or a root of another plant so that a union is formed and the partners continue to grow.
This October, we have invited three dance artists/teams to spend a week in the Drill Hall with an artist from a different art discipline such as poetry, film, or music and explore what fertile opportunities these grafting processes create and how each is enriched through the collaboration.
Our 2023 GRAFTING Space Grant residents are:
Allie Graham & Strickland Young with composer Joseph Franklin
This research period will be a meeting point of Naarm-based bassist and composer Joseph Franklin and movement artists Allie Graham and Strickland Young. Franklin’s work is grounded in movement-based principles, and spans improvised, notated, experimental music. With movement a catalyst and integral means of making in each of their practice, they will investigate how they intersect and more specifically look at cyclical movement, micro-movement repetitions, and application of small gesture in realisation of a character.
“We want to look at what happens between the notes, in the gaps, at the interstices. To parallel micro-sounds with micro-gestures of movement; give voice to the stutters, hesitations and sideways glances in both sonic and physical form. Through this exchange, we hope to distill a hybrid movement-sound form we use as a shared language towards a performance titled “a thousand tiny mutinies”, a sonic and physical realisation of Joseph’s extended solo bass album.”
Photographers: Shannon May Powell (left), Jasmin Luna (middle), Robert Catto (right)
David Huggins with poet Faye Jarrett
Mid-career dance artist David Huggins will collaborate with emerging visual artist and poet Faye Jarrett who has recently expanded their practice to include live performance. They will playfully indulge in each other’s practices through physical propositions, writing, sharing, and a lot of conversation.
“It will be a meeting of two artists, in different fields, used to different artistic processes and in different stages of life, choosing to dedicate a week to conversation and sharing. I am excited by the prospect of working with Faye, because I know that they will bring a very different set of assumptions and experiences into the room. Dancers often have a shorthand; a way of sharing what is already known and expected. This can be generative, but can also create blindspots. I am hoping through this collaboration that I am able to circumvent some of these ‘givens’, and explore new territory with an emerging young artist.”
Photographers: Blake Houghton (left), Petra Mingneau (right)
Olivia Hadley & Romain Hassanin with videographer Johnas Liu
Olivia Hadley will collaborate with Romain Hassanin developing a video project celebrating human skill and emotional chaos, combining their shared movement language from partnering, breaking, hip hop, tricking, contemporary dance, and martial arts. This is a continuation of their first development of the project, where they began to roughly piece together scenes that include material and phrases created during a week-long residency as part of March Dance 2023. They are using the space at the Drill Hall to refine and conceptualise their material, to be filmed by Johnas Liu later on during the week at a few different locations specific to the mood and concept of each scene of the video.
Photo: still from the video filmed by Johnas Liu
Space Grants are supported by Woollahra Municipal Council