Last year Bare Bones came to Melbourne to work with Roz Warby. What was intriguing for me was not the choreography, but who they were, where they came from (Adelaide), what possessed them to get their asses to Melbourne to do this, a whole collective coming here for weeks.
Now John Jasperse has been in town for a couple of weeks from New York working with Becky Hilton and Jodi Melnick on Becky, Jodi and John, and there’s this whole New York element to the contemporary dance scene in Melbourne – Phillip Adams, Lucy Guerin as well as Becky that doesn’t get mentioned a lot but is largely responsible for the look and style in town for the last several years.
Another recent arrival – again – is Frieder Weiss, who did the interactive lighting for Chunky Move’s Glow, and is here for another project that I don’t really know much about. And that’s the point.
All this dance never gets mentioned in the media, no reviews, interviews, paragraph fillers, and all this gets talked about in rather vague at best word-of-mouth. But this, far more than the performances that do get reviewed by virtue of budget, publicist, reviewer, magazine space, is the ecosystem of the contemporary dance scene in Melbourne. And if it goes, passes on with no real record of its presence, then, as my friend Paul the film makers likes to say, “if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen”.
I’ve been thinking for a while about having conversations with various people I know in the dance scene, just talking about their work, what they’re into, not necessarily about any impending performances that are usually necessary to acquire space in a newspaper or magazine. I was also thinking about these three different groups of artists and that I want to know what they’re doing.
So, I sent out an email today to everyone I could think of in the Melbourne dance scene, opening up supernaut to whatever they are doing. I always love raving exuberantly about my friends’ performances and shows, for me this is part of why I blog, I love art, I think my friends who make art generally are stupendous geniuses and everyone should know this and go see their work, so really it’s just more of the same.
i want your dance
As some of you know, I’ve been blogging on art and dance in Australia, China and Europe for the last three years on supernaut.info
I’d like to open up my blog to what you’re doing in Melbourne, developing new performances, researching stuff, showings, performances, installations, films, all kinds of art in all kinds of places. I especially want to see and write about stuff that isn’t getting reviewed in newspapers and magazines.
There have been some amazing people come through Melbourne in the last few months, and there are a lot of people here doing amazing stuff who I have no idea who they are, and I think they and what they are doing should be written and talked about.
Some enticements:
It’s free.
supernaut is a well-known part of blog scenes talking about arts and dance in Australia, Hong Kong and China, and bits of Europe, and has been nominated for a few blog awards.
I have around 3000 readers a day.
It’s still free.
Please spread this around