Critical Dialogues

Critical Dialogues #16
Two decades of choreographic enquiry

A special edition of Critical Dialogues celebrating 20 years of Critical Path. Edited by Ira Ferris.

Contributions by:
Nikki Heywood, Gail Priest, Alexandra Harrison, WeiZen Ho, Lizzie Thomson,  Tammi Gissell, Sophie Travers, Claire Hicks, Julie-Anne Long, Agnès Michelet, Vicki Van Hout.

Weaved through the edition is Ira Ferris’ experimental archive project “Vignettes flickers fades” which collages voices of eleven Critical Path artists into a collective body, paying equal attention to that which is remembered and that which is forgotten or transformed into an utterance.

Artists featured in the “Vignettes” are: Patricia Wood, Angela Goh, Rhiannon Newton, Lizzie Thomson, Vicki Van Hout, Linda Luke, Martin del Amo, Nikki Heywood, Ryuichi Fujimura, Victoria Hunt and Jane McKernan.

Part of this edition is also a sound montage, “Vignettes flickers fades”, created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Alexandra Spence. Listen here.

The 16^th edition of Critical Dialogues is designed by Zoe Baumgartner.

Printed copies can be ordered through [email protected]

The production of this issue of Critical Dialogues and the “Vignettes flickers fades” project are proudly supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW, the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and the Woollahra Municipal Council’s Cultural Grants Program.

The 15th edition of Critical Dialogues – themed: TIME – brings contributions by Kay Armstrong, Nareeporn Vachananda, Rhiannon Newton, el waddingham, Natalie Quan Yau Tso, Laura Osweiler, as well as the transcript of the 2023 March Dance conversation ‘What happens in the pause?’ and a review of Angela Goh’s ‘Axe Arc Echo’.

From essays and academic texts to performance scripts and instructional scores, these works are written by dancers and movement-artists acutely attuned to time from corporeal perspective. They contemplate the relationship between human-time and the geological scale of time that surrounds them, the impact of gravity on one’s perception of time, the relationship between urgency and intergenerational trauma, the way that time (via memory) leaves residues within the body, the dizzying affect of epic regularity, and the value of pause in circumventing habits and accessing new possibilities.

Edited by Ira Ferris
Graphic design by Zoe Baumgartner
Published by Critical Path, March 2024

You can read and download it here.

This issue brings into focus Australia’s First Nations dance makers in a revealing and honest dialogue on what informs and inspires their creativity. Revealing the layered and complicated histories, understanding meaning, and methodologies embodying, what BEING Indigenous is, and how the principles and learnings from Family, Elders and Communities are translated through movement.

We Hear, We See, We Learn, We Share, We Teach

This publication is the second edition of Critical Dialogues Issue 13 that focuses on dance archives. In this edition each artist shares their approach and experience on archiving along with the opportunities, challenges, and benefits of archives to ongoing practice. Artists in their writings also question embodied archiving and the place of the body in dance archives.  

This publication features Charemaine Seet, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Lisa Petty, Martin Del Amo, Matthew Doyle and Wu-Kang Chen.  Co-edited by Claire Hicks and Ozlem Bekiroglou Aldogan.

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This project is supported by City of Sydney.  

This issue of Critical Dialogues focuses on dance archives and specifically that of choreographers with an established and significant relationship with the City of Sydney. It marks the end of the first stage of a wider project, Dancing Sydney : Mapping Movements : Performing Histories, a partnership between Critical Path and the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and Macquarie University, working with twelve artists/artist group from 2016 – 2020.

This publication features writing by Amanda Card, Kay Armstrong, Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Dean Walsh, Vicki Van Hout, The Fondue Set (Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders), Melati Suryodarmo, Ghenoa Gela and Erin Brannigan. Co-edited by Claire Hicks and Elizabeth Chua.

Dancing Sydney Archive Project is supported by City of Sydney, 2019 & 2020.

This issue focuses on digital technologies in research, development, and practice. As technology develops and improves, choreographers and performers explore the possibilities digital media can offer to the process of creating and performing dance. The contributing artists’ texts, audios, videos and images focus on the relationship between the live body and the digital technologies that become part of their daily life and an influence on the process of their work discipline.

Edited by Jodie McNeilly Renaudie with contributions from Eddie Ladd, Matt Cornell, Monica Stevens and Simo Kellokumpu.

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This publication is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. 

Artists from four continents, an educator and a producer, share their thoughts and work. We asked them to write a ‘feeling response’ to the Anthropocene.

Edited by Tamar Kelly with contributions from Renae Shadler, Eko Supriyanto, Sam Hertz, Emily Johnson, Kenneth McLeod and Pippa Bailey.

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Following on from Critical Path’s Choreographic Hack Laboratory in January 2019 some of the participants share the entry points and ongoing questions and considerations in relation to the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’.

Edited by Bek Conroy with contributions from Astrida Neimanis, Henrietta Baird, Ivey Wawn, Jodie McNeilly and Sarah Pini.

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In volume #10, the absent body is placed in relief against the non-sighted body and the aliveness of objects, culminating in a meditation on what absence might mean in today’s post-fordist era.
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In volume #9, artists and curators explore intersections between dance and visual art.

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In volume #8, artists examine how environments shape experience and output in the creative realm.

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In the second volume of CD#7, artists write about how they create work out of the material they live and foster new and unique choreographic approaches. ACCESSIBLE WORD DOC

Choreographers speak about their experiences and claiming spaces as artists with disability.
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Explores intercultural practice, exchange, reflections of the presentations including Speak Local and other Interchange Festival events held at Critical Path in 2015.

Exercises in writing towards, about, around and alongside writing by Sydney’s Writing Dancing group.

The curatorial process, what it means to be a young artist in the program, the increasing presence of producers and the Sydney perspective.

Dedicated to the intimate activities, oblique acts, and invisible efforts that feed into the work of choreography.

We feel. We listen. We wait.

Groping for meaningful threads, the logic, our senses not making sense, we probe the hidden, fall over the obvious, turn on constructions, trace connections, impose coherence, and proliferate the imagined…

Locating writing and dancing as partners in practice, process, performance and documentation.