1.5x12 | Phluxus2 Dance Collective
There’s a reason why the performing arts are so beloved by those that participate in them, and it goes beyond aesthetics, ego or fame. It’s the visceral lived experience the performing arts gives participants. The opportunity to live utterly in the present whilst deconstructing the past or dreaming of the future. When you are on a stage, you cannot be either yesterday or tomorrow. There is just Now. The performing arts has the ability to make time stand still and to propel you though space with such force that you emerge a completely different person. This is true for both performer and watcher.
We humans spend all our time watching each other, watching for the obvious clues and the tiny ones, using whatever senses we each have at our disposal to read each other, to dig for comfort, attraction, danger, enmity, friendship. Across the world people have been isolated from each other in a quite unprecedented way. We’ve gone inside, literally and metaphorically, and instead of touch and scent and small sounds, instead we’ve been trying to glean information from status updates and cover images, find nuance in emoji, analyse zoom backgrounds and response rates. It’s not ideal for the fleshy, mortal, visceral human race.
And so, when a socially distanced opportunity came up, an opportunity to return and gaze upon a stage of sorts, those that need to process through the act of witnessing gathered on a bright winter afternoon.
1.5 x 12 is a 10-minute contemporary dance piece created as an artistic artefact made during and in response to isolation. It was created and performed by Phluxus2 Dance Collective, and presented as part of Anywhere Festival’s reimagined 2020 offerings.
Warm sun. Green grass. Cold wine. The white of the soft clothes of the dancers. The patient squat old bowls club. A picnic blanket and a field of audience. These are a few of my favourite things.
Gathered roughly on the dusty green, pockets of people scattered in a circle around the dancers. I glazed my eyes a little and let it smooth into one animal, and become more than the sum of its parts, and less, a mediation of moving bodies. Each dancer seemed to describe an individual journey, such as we each have had in our own homes, our individual isolation, but the unity also spoke to the wider collective experience, to the truth of being apart and together, the perennial human condition.
“The choreography responds to the realities of living as a dancer in this time and is as much about performance as it is about community.”
I’m going to throw the baton to Phluxus2 Dance Collective Artistic Director and choreographer Nerida Matthaei, who has gathered some thoughts about creating 12 x 1.5 – A Contemporary Dance Event.
Images: Emz Imagery, except cover image: Nerida Matthaei
Nerida writes…
Historically, in times of crisis artistic practice has proven important to societies ability to negotiate change, process trauma and embody experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced dance artists to navigate the loss of their creative outlets whilst being statically isolated, a challenge when we are highly physical practitioners. The choreographic work being created now, in response to this crisis, are important artistic artefacts reflecting this time and place.
It’s been an interesting time to reconsider, reflect and take stock of what is important to my dance practice and my vision for Phluxus2 Dance Collective, a company of artists based in Brisbane. Initially the shock of projects cancelling and the grief of losing the years planned activities was overwhelming. Once the initial shock had settled, I found myself drawn to prioritising community connectivity and spontaneous creation through online exchange. The artists of Phluxus2 are mostly in Brisbane with some artists inter-state and international, since restriction kicked in, we have been unable to train, rehearse or perform together in person. I began wondering how we could remain collectively creative, but in a relaxed manner that didn’t add any further pressure to the uncertain landscape we were in. I started finding new avenues to explore creativity, follow my impulses and be responsive to change in the moment has been essential. I’ve explored site-specific choreography on my couch, started a number of online collaborative exchange projects, developed a solo unpacking metal health in isolation and created some spontaneous and instinctual visual art pieces, most of which are just for me – a gift. I’ve found time to recalibrate my understanding of self in this shifting terrain. More than ever I feel the deep value of my choreographic self, my collaborators, my community and the significance of arts and culture of our country.
Out of this creative dreaming… a coping… came 1.5x12
I set up a small studio space under my house where I could train and attempt to remain creative. I began exploring choreography that spoke to concepts of isolation, my states of mental health and concepts of connectivity. Initially I created the choreography for a schools protest, working with Shailer Park State High School students via video. It was an important outlet for me in this time where I did struggle with the unknown and a sense of loss. It was a slow creative process but one very much connecting to my understanding of now… it provided an important outlet in a very hard time. The choreography became an artefact of my realities of Covid-19 as an dance at that time. Then, through a need to continue to provide the Phluxus2 community a place to train and remain creative, we started meeting once a week in an outdoor space to train, dance and share the choreography to a group of 12 performers. It started as a way to keep us together and lift our spirits and what emerged was a stunning new short work that was able to remain safe within covid and use some of the parameters as a creative framework. Each dancer had their own 1.5 square meter space, the work was viewed in a 360 degree perspective allowing to to experiment with patterns and active space, exploring content directly derived from the isolation experience. Being able to share this work with our close community through live performance was a gift.
The purpose of the work is layered. The project it self, including the performance gathering, was just as much about community as it was about creative exploration. I have really felt deeply the importance of relationships and our abilities to keep each other safe, secure and valued. One one hand the work is a rich tessellation of bodies responding to the covid pandemic creating a performative artefact of this time, but on the other it is a joyous celebration of artistry and community.
We are now dreaming up future iterations of the work in community spaces around Brisbane and also an online version that can be shared beyond Brisbane exploring multiple locations.
Images: Emz Imagery
