Dancing with my multiple bodies

Dancing with my multiple bodies - Performance Exhibition
Deakin Phoenix Gallery
Thursday 6 July 2023
5pm-8pm

Dancing with my multiple bodies, comprises two works: Seven fragments in six loops – a three-hour live performance and Twenty-four moments in six minutes – a six-minute film that is played on loop for the duration of the performance exhibition. These works are intended to be watched in fragments. Their existence is bound up in the repetition of spatial and temporal structures and therefore, viewing them in their entirety is not required. For this reason, these works are presented utilising conventional understandings of a gallery where audiences are given agency and choice around their viewing preferences.

Twenty-four moments in six minutes documents my improvised dancing over expanding intervals of time. The work is held by a number of temporal structures where I improvised for six minutes on the hour, every hour, for six hours; once a day for six days; once a week for six weeks; and finally, once a month for six months. Captured in a black box theatre and lit in such a way that each figure (each of my dancing bodies) appears to exist within what Harmony Bench (2010:53–54) describes as ‘no-place’ – a somewhat never-ending acontextual black space ‘absent of spatial and political markers’. These twenty-four dancing occurrences have then been edited together in chronological order and presented as a montage in a borderless grid-like formation. Aligned together according to the timer I used while dancing, my multiple female bodies are then moving in relation to each other held by the underlying temporal structure of the work.

Seven fragments in six loops is a three-hour performance work that exists as a live translation of the film – Twenty-four moments in six minutes, a medium where time cannot be compressed. Held by a temporal grid-like structure, there are seven fragments of improvised dancing that I repeat on loop, six times. Each repetition is again, held by expanding intervals of time. In the first loop, each fragment is danced with for one minute, the next loop – two minutes, then three minutes, and so on. Utilising digital technologies, each fragment multiplies my body in various ways, which are either repeated or accumulated over the duration of the performance.