danced process #2: in-site

2014. Performance practice and improvisation-score.

Presented as a work-in-progress at Australian Dance Theatre's 2014 Rough Draft platform, Adelaide.


In 2014 I move from Scotland to South Australia. I spend much of my time outdoors in the bushland, immersed in its strangeness, experiencing a sense of displacement, dislocation, alienation. The practice of this score is something like a meditation or a self-portrait, reflecting this restlessness and alienation. It is composed of three threads which can be selected in any order and improvised upon for any duration. These threads draw on a mapping of a site, a reflection upon the un-settling impact of settlement, and a memory of the place left behind. There is formlessness, aimlessness and broken flow. There are pauses for thinking. The process aims to give pause for thought.

The three threads of the score are:

in-site: draws on a mapping of the environment - its space, time, forms and dynamics - from the dual perspectives of one's presence in the site and of the embodied presence of the site in self.
un-settled: follows the in-site score, but at every impulse to move it pauses, then does the opposite, reflecting how the landscape and ecology have been unsettled by the impact of settlers.
in-limbo: aims to create airless 'pockets of the past which punctuate the present' by referring back to previous places and projects, recycling memories and choreographic materials which are incorporated into pauses in the breathing cycle of the in-site score.
► VIDEO DOCUMENTATION
► showing at ADT Rough Draft, 2014