Writing
Dancing with my multiple bodies: examining identity across live and digital materialities
This practice-led PhD research project investigated how the creation of a dance work using both live and digital forms has the capacity to reveal understandings about a queer feminine identity. My project traversed dance improvisation, dance film, and a hybrid live digital choreographic practice as a means of multiplying myself, and then dancing with my multiple bodies. Throughout this project, I created a number of performance works that moved between live and digital materialities, centred around documenting my improvised dancing, repeatedly, over long periods of time. Through this work, I aimed to establish the possibility of dance work which sits outside of the norms of queer representation.
The project culminated in a performance exhibition, Dancing with my multiple bodies presented at Deakin University (Melbourne) in July 2023. It comprised two works: Seven fragments in six loops – a three-hour live performance, and Twenty-four moments in six minutes – a six-minute dance film that was played on loop for the duration of the performance exhibition. These two works emerged as translations of the works of Kuniko Kato, Tehching Hsieh, and Deborah Hay and Motion Bank, and were grounded in repetition and multiplicity – of bodies, structures, time, and fragmented dances.
Citation:
Practising Sameness: Inside a long-term improvisation practice
This article describes the practising of a weekly group dance improvisation practice that has been taking place for more than ten years. The practice was/is instigated by Olivia Millard resulting from a three-year Ph.D. exploration. Although the practice is based in Millard’s own dance interests, the practice is not aimed at ‘teaching’ this practice or suggesting that this model of practising should be adopted or ‘learned’. Instead, the (non-deliberate) teaching that takes place emphasizes the ongoing act of practising itself. This article explores the embodied experiences of practising over time in two parts. The first is written by Millard who describes the way the practising is tied to the use of scores and how the significance of the practising lies in the regular doing of the same thing, over and over again. The second part of the article is written by a long-term participant, Ashlee Barton, who writes from the point of view of participating in this practice regularly and consistently over such a long period of time.
Keywords: dance, improvisation, practising, repetition, scores, memory
Citation: Millard, O., & Barton, A. (2023). Practising sameness: Inside a long-term dance improvisation practice. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 15(1), 93-105.
https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00098_1
Re-presenting a dance moment
This visual essay deconstructs a four-second experience within a dance performance, In and out of time, which was performed at Dancehouse (Melbourne, AUS) in 2018. It captures the body’s movement as still moments and re-presents them through a tiled image and a video ‘flip-book’ work. Together with language, the visual essay aims to reveal how, over time, the memory of this experience has become magnified and thickened, drawing out new ways of knowing in relation to an embodied experience each time it is recollected.
Keywords: dancing, memory, time, experience
Citation: Barton, A. (2020). Re-presenting a dance moment. Idea Journal. 17(2), 256-274.
https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v17i02.350.
Dancing in and out of time: noticing the present through repetition
My MA (Research) exegesis examines the relationship between an engagement in practice and an encounter with being present. I have reinvented and repurposed the working methods of improviser, Dr Olivia Millard, and post-modern choreographer, Trisha Brown, as a lens to examine the relationship between the idea of practising and being present. Key to these ideas are the concepts of repetition and noticing, which are explored and elaborated upon throughout this exegesis with the help of ideas of thinkers and practitioners including: Sally Banes, Bojana Cvejic, Gilles Deleuze, Kent De Spain, Susan Foster, Edward Hall, and Antonia Pont. The project culminated in a performance, In and out of time, which was performed at Dancehouse (Melbourne) in November 2018.
Citation: Barton, A. (2020) ‘Dancing in and out of time: noticing the present through repetition’ (MA Thesis, Deakin University.
https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Dancing_in_and_out_of_time_noticing_the_present_through_repetition/21116971