Traces from elsewhere: dancing together across distance and time

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the patchwork of meaning, connections and perspectives within a creative project from the viewpoint of an insider collaborator/performer. It plays across affective registers of distance and closeness with an oscillating lens which shifts focus to engage with different perspectives of the creative process. It transitions between the micro and macro views of a dance piece through this situated perspective of a performer by linking personal meaning making to the broader socio-political context in which the work emerges. The piece under discussion, Time Over Distance Over Time is deeply intimate, in that the content is drawn from the lives of the performers who endeavored to reignite personal connections over large distances and work creatively in a dispersed space before coming together to complete the dance piece. The article weaves between various narrative layers and writing registers, uncovering the complexity of the creative process and the subject matter as experienced by the author, to question how mobility might be enabled or curtailed, through circulating bodies, texts and/or digital traces.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary dance
• creative process
• migration
• performer’s perspective
• nomadism

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to Liz Roche and all the artists and collaborators involved in Time Over Distance Over Time, Queensland University of Technology and Alys Longley for her feedback on an early draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jenny Roche http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2305-3685

Notes

1 Liz Roche is director of Liz Roche Company, Dublin. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, it is established as one of the foremost contemporary dance companies in Ireland (for further information see https://www.lizrochecompany.com).

2 Throughout the article I refer to all of the cast by their first names to reflect the connections between us as a group.

3 For example, I had danced with British choreographer, Rosemary Butcher, and so had Rahel and Henry but I had never performed with either of them. Grant and Rahel had danced together in Carol Brown’s work in London in the early 2000s and Simone, Liz and I had worked together in Dublin for many years in the 1990s. Liz was currently working with Henry on a range of dance projects and Rahel and Henry had worked together in London for many years. Finally, Liz, Grant and I had worked together for Liz Roche Company from 2001 to 2013.

4 Decoda, based at University of Coventry and curated by Katye Coe, produced the festival Summer Dancing involving dance workshops, performances and residencies from 2007 until 2016.

5 See Varinia Canto Vila (2014) for a discussion on the nomadic lifestyle of the freelance dancer.

6 Time Over Distance Over Time was presented as a participatory dance, film and digital technology installation, accessible for all ages at Live Collision Festival in December 2016 in Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

7 The production was augmented by funding I secured from Australia Council for the Arts, which primarily was to support the Australian part of the project (that is, fees for Simone and Grant, travel costs and production costs for performances in Australia). Further funding was secured from Culture Ireland, as part of their I Am Ireland Centenary Programme 2016, to bring the European cast and crew to Australia.

8 See Skype Stay Together [Accessed 29 August 2017] http://showcase.noagencyname.com/SkypeStayTogether/