Great Southern Dance
Launching and developing a new professional dance entity’s creative practice:
State Stories is a highly significant project because, the company’s first artistic production and launched GSD’s creative practice. As such, it was the first project to test the company’s ideas about itself, which include:
- that it is interdisciplinary;
- that it can be influenced by being based and birthed in Tasmania;
- that it is genuinely and generatively collaborative;
- that immersive development periods can influence the quality of the choreography.
State Stories was also GSD’s first opportunity to test the ideas around the two contrasting modes of production: broadcast and narrowcast. Can these/should these even be siloed? What does it mean if they are? Is this useful or stupid? Does it make for interesting movement? How does this separation inform how rehearsals, filming trials, the website, online platforming, documentation, fund raising even grant-writing, are approached.
Artists on Location
‘State Stories’ is a proposal for collaborative experimentation for 5 days commencing in late January 2020 with four artists: Felicity Bott, Olivia McPherson, Nicholas Higgins, Paul Wakelam.
The project was undertaken living on an historic site in the southern midlands of Tasmania aiming to creatively respond to history, architecture, landscape and how these impact our nervous systems.
The Process
A month out from the Scoping Phase, Felicity and Olivia agreed State Stories would:
– be an immersive process undertaken in view of building, in due course, a full-length ‘solo’ of meaning and relevance to our respective practices;
– reflect Felicity’s commitment to avant-garde action: that is, deploying professional, collaborative and interdisciplinary artistry in ways that open up, examine, agitate and activate;
– incorporate Olivia’s curiosity about returning to roots and relationships in Australia following two years based internationally in a ‘bubble’ of rigour, immersed in the consumingly stimulating practice of another.
For the 5-day Scoping Phase in January, Felicity and Olivia developed solo material that visited multiple ‘state stories’, interior narratives that comprise ways of accounting for the rhythm of regulation, dysregulation and coregulation of an individual’s nervous system. A ‘state story’ originates in human physiology, NOT psychology and so was, and is, of interest to Felicity and Olivia as dancers and choreographers. Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges. 1994) figured in much of their early research and conversations and is informing dance process and performance as ‘State Stories’ unfolds.
‘State Stories’ is a proposal for collaborative experimentation for 10 days commencing in late September 2020 with four artists: Felicity Bott, Olivia McPherson, Nicholas Higgins, Paul Wakelam.
The project is undertaken living on an historic site in the southern midlands of Tasmania and so integrates history, architecture, landscape and neurology.
A month out from the Scoping Phase, Felicity and Olivia agreed State Stories would:
– be an immersive process undertaken in view of building, in due course, a full-length ‘solo’ of meaning and relevance to our respective practices;
– reflect Felicity’s commitment to avant-garde action: that is, deploying professional, collaborative and transdisciplinary artistry in ways that open up, examine, agitate and activate;
– incorporate Olivia’s curiosity about returning to roots and relationships in Australia following two years based internationally in a ‘bubble’ of rigour, immersed in the consumingly stimulating practice of another.
For the 3-day Scoping Phase in January, Felicity and Olivia agreed to develop solo material that visited multiple ‘state stories’, interior narratives that comprise ways of accounting for the rhythm of regulation, dysregulation and coregulation of an individual’s nervous system. A ‘state story’ originates in human physiology, NOT psychology and so was, and is, of interest to Felicity and Olivia as dancers and choreographers. Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges. 1994) figured in much of their early research and conversations and is informing dance process and performance as ‘State Stories’ unfolds.
