A space grant residency made available to independent choreographers from NSW to develop ideas previously proposed to Critical Path as a research project. The choreographers will work in an open studio format which encourages cross-fertilization of ideas and skills, while each artist has their own project interests.
‘I’m so grateful to have been able to work in the Critical Path space for the last two days. It was inspiring to be amongst other independent artists working creatively on their own projects too.’ Tanya Voges
Rhiannon Newton
Doing Dancing” is a quiet ceremony for dance. Shedding a choreographic voice that aims to say something about the world through dance, this project instead attempts to clear a space for dance to breath, and live in. Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Isadora Duncan “Orta or One Dancing” becomes a textual frame that holds this space for dance to be in. Meditating on the process of dancing, or perhaps writing, Stein describes being one body doing one thing, which is simultaneously and inevitably many different bodies, in the process of doing and becoming many different things. I have been working with translating the predominant pronoun of “Orta or One Dancing”, “she/her”, to plural pronouns, “he”, “I”, “it”, “you”, “we” and “they” and exploring the affect this has on subsequent doings of dancing.
Kirsten Packham is a cross-disciplinary artist exploring the body as abstract material. Her work is informed by drawing processes, questions around perception and BodyWeather. She is in the beginning stages of developing a new work.
Matt Cornell & Joshua Thomson
Blokes: (currently in development) A new dance performance by Matt Cornell and Joshua Thomson drawing on stories gathered from a month on the road through the top end of Australia, stories from ‘Aussie blokes’, beyond the beer …
Fiona Jopp explores the relationship between music, emotive expression and pure dance movement and how manipulating certain aspects of performance can dramatically change the audience’s perception of the dance itself.
Miranda Wheen of Dance Makers Collective will be using the Critical Path studio to test the dramaturgical impact of new audio material on existing choreography, and to begin to develop new material in response to the audio.
Ryuichi Fujimura & Kate Sherman are interested in exploring the relationship between dance and text as well as our own individual relationship to text. We will explore voice and text in our improvisations and what place it has in the landscape of dance. How can we dance text and be danced by it, like we are danced by time and space and how can it be just another part of the landscape, rather than a separate element? How can these two forms work together to communicate to an audience.
Tanya Voges & Katy Alexander
Dance Artist Tanya Voges is researching the process of communication and connectivity to generate a movement language for a solo dance work. Collaborating with theatre director, Katy Alexander. this integrated media performance will bring together live dance performance with bespoke motion graphics.
Laura (Amara) Osweiler, PhD
Laura has been exploring the connections and disconnections of various middle eastern dances and street dances. For the past 18 months she have been developing new techniques and vocabulary. Laura is stilling using music as my source of inspiration that connects the two. Unlike her last exploration of this material, this new work is abstract and has a series of vignettes, tastings, of the different ideas that she has been finding. There are pieces of Turkish Romany, Classical Persian, Lebanese debke, American belly dance and liquid, pop, ticks, tutting (aka pharaonic) and twerking.
Omer Backley-Astrachan in a Sydney based independent choreographer. Omer will use the Drill Hall to rehearse his work Valley that will premiere in the Sydney Fringe Festival on the 20th and 25th of September. As well as this Omer will further research his choreographic practice, this time through the theoretical exploration of the Nordic town of Svalbard and the making and unmaking of materialistic meaning.