Critical Path respectfully acknowledges the Gadigal and Birrabirragal clans, the traditional custodians of the land where the organisation is based. We pay our respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Editor
Ira Ferris
Graphic Designer
Zoe Baumgartner
Printed by Printgraphics Printgreen
Critical Path is Australia’s leading organisation for choreographic enquiry, research and development. Our mission is to nurture and support independent Australian choreographers to push the boundaries of existing contemporary practice. Critical Path supports choreographers to explore new ways of working, develop new collaborations, and engage in dialogue and critical conversations.
Critical Path is proudly supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
The production of this issue of Critical Dialogues was assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. The “Vignettes flickers fades” project was assisted by Woollahra Municipal Council.
criticalpath.org.au
Editor’s Letter
Vignettes flickers fades: Part 1
Memory of a place –forgetting of a place
Nikki Heywood
Sounds follow bodies follow sounds
Gail Priest
Vignettes flickers fades: Part 2
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”
Alexandra Harrison
pathways, remembrances
WeiZen Ho
Vignettes flickers fades: Part 3
At Sea
Lizzie Thomson
Re-membered
Tammi Gissell
Image Memories
Sophie Travers
Claire Hicks
Vignettes flickers fades: Part 4
Twenty Choreographic Scores for Twenty Years
Julie-Anne Long
Champagne
Agnès Michelet
Busy bodies doing body business… for 20 years now Vicki Van Hout
Contributors
Image credits
“… even when I'm alone in this the presence of the spirit of the waters here, as well as what I'm own genealogy. And that becomes sensitised, collaborative space.”
space, I don't feel alone, I feel the Country, of the lands, of the carrying with me in terms of my becomes a very important, heightened,
“… and light and air that moves through – and out – and back in – across a day, a week, a month.” Nikki Heywood, Memory of a place – forgetting of a place
Many shapes of air and light have passed through Drill Hall, home of Critical Path, over the past twenty years. Myriad dance movements explored, choreographic ideas exchanged, creative risks taken. Hundreds of bodies entwined, crossing paths and limbs – skin to skin, breath to breath. A community of dance artists gathered by the harbour where ocean breeze mixes with their sweat, the sound of halyards with the rubbing of bare feet against the shiny black tarkett. Their joyous laughter accompanied by that of kookaburras. A community held together by the following sentiments1:
Quietly sitting here by the harbour, the Drill Hall has much to tell, and this edition of Critical Dialogues is a space for this telling. A space to reflect on two decades of choreographic enquiry, not to permanently dwell there but to invigorate future movement epiphanies: “casting eyes on what was … to form adequate cartographies for how to continue” (Alexandra Harrison).
But before we continue and find “a kind of dance that has no end” (Lizzie Thomson), we bring our bodies to a momentary stillness: “this time just before, that’s the most useful” ( Vicki Van Hout, “Vignettes”). We pause to assemble this archive –an opportunity to notice the vibrations of past movements pulsating through our bodies, the pace of our breath, the gravity holding our frame, the temperature of air swirling around our skin. We pause so we can continue moving – same, yet new – for that is our strength.
The texts on the following pages take you inside the yellow walls of the heritage Drill Hall, to whisper and (why not) shout about the notable impact of Critical Path on the independent dance sector in NSW, if not beyond. To capture twenty years in fine detail would be a futile task. Instead, what you hold in your hands is an archive that harvests the essence of this place, its overall atmosphere – to activate your sensing of Critical Path; what it stands for and how it stands.
Archiving the atmosphere is like bottling the fragrance of a perfume. This archive is not made of hard data but of much softer material: memory.
Weaved throughout the edition is the archival project “Vignettes flickers fades”, which collages voices of eleven Critical Path artists into a collective body, paying equal attention to that which is remembered and that which is forgotten or transformed into an utterance. “Vignettes” focus on multi-sensory memories, to reflect not only the significant moments in Critical Path programs and activities, but to invoke sounds, smells, colours of the heritage building, its water-based location and porous features that imbue creative processes. As such, “Vignettes” are an archive and a map of Drill Hall (the building) – a space carrier of Critical Path.
Alongside the “Vignettes”, eleven commissioned texts address the history of Critical Path through: memory of sounds (Gail Priest), memory imprinted in the bones ( Tammi Gissell), spatial memory (Nikki Heywood), and the residue of the forgotten (Lizzie Thomson). A couple of interactive pieces invite you to move while internalising a member of the Critical Path community (WeiZen Ho) or enact ‘Twenty Choreographic Scores for Twenty Years’ (Julie-Anne Long). Inside these is LOVE –the scaffolding that holds it all together, for it is love that has shaped Critical Path for the past twenty years and will nurse it in years to come, because “love flows” (Alexandra Harrison).
Ira Ferris
Former Artistic Directors (Sophie Travers and Claire Hicks) send us birthday cards with memory screenshots – the first images (or scenes) that come to their mind, almost involuntarily, when thinking of Critical Path – that which has stuck in their retina, because our brain too is a photographic device.
To conclude the celebratory occasion – the 20th birthday of Critical Path – current Artistic Director Agnès Michelet, who is feeling the value of it all currently and palpably, opens the champagne for Vicki Van Hout to raise the glass for twenty more, at least, years to come.
“Memory is compressed time,”2 I heard Tammi Gissell say once, for whom memory is also time calcified – something that WeiZen Ho refers to as “internalisation”. Memory exceeds our awareness but nevertheless forms our identities, which in the case of Critical Path are entwined in the network of community: we become layers of others.
The sense of entwining is a distinct feature of Critical Path and exists throughout this edition of Critical Dialogues, where many of the texts invoke one another, accidentally cross-referencing. We establish these connections on the page margins to emphasise the webbing, the “archive of relations.”3 French philosopher and art historian, Georges Didi-Huberman calls it “anachronistic montage” or “crossrhythm”, inviting us to observe that “in each historical object all ages meet, collide, melt into each other in their forms, branch out, or overlap one another.”4 And so it is here – in the Drill Hall at Critical Path – and will continue to be, as we keep overlapping and cross-pollinating for generations to come.
More than a memory, Agnès reminds us, we are here, we exist, we thrive, and sail forth. This edition of Critical Dialogues is only a map for the needed returns.5
Love, Ira
1Words shared by Critical Path artists as part of the “Vignettes flickers fades” project, Q: What are the first three words that come to your mind when you think of Critical Path?
2A note taken at 'Dance Archives and the Museum' researchnetwork workshop, convened by UNSW in March 2025.
3A term offered by writer and artist Amy Prcevich in "Affective Archive: (RE)", July 2025.
4Lista, Marcella. 2014. Play Dead: Dance, Museums, and the "Time-Based Arts." Dance Research Journal 46(3), p9.
5In her text "What a stream of thoughts...", Alexandra Harrison writes: “We need a map for these kinds of returns,” p52.
Editor’s Letter
Part 1
Lizzie Thomson
Ryuichi Fujimura
Vicki Van Hout
Nikki Heywood
Martin del Amo
Rhiannon Newton
Linda Luke
Jane McKernan
Patricia Wood
Angela Goh
Victoria Hunt
‘Vignettes flickers fades’ was inspired by the gap. I have spent some weeks in the Critical Path archives, rummaging through the web material and printed resources. Years. Titles of workshops and residencies; their brief descriptions. Names of facilitators and lead-artists. I found the facts, but how sweaty was it in the room? What shapes were made, what choreographic revelations absorbed? Who else was there and what did they chat about during the break in the kitchen? Who came in late? I missed the flesh. I wanted to be there amongst it all; peek in through the windows, cross the threshold of time. I wanted to imagine.
I needed memories.
I knew that the details I was missing weren’t stored on the hard drives but – more securely – in the tissues, bones, brain synapses and steps of the dance artists who have walked in and out of the Drill Hall over the last twenty years.
If they can remember.
Sorry, there’s going to be lots that I can’t remember. 20 years ago! LT RF
yeah, I only very very vaguely remember
Memory “is not the opposite of forgetting but its lining,”1 observes filmmaker Chris Marker as he assembles images in Sans Soleil. Assembling, editing, sculpting – these are all fitting analogies for remembering. As we sculpt the memory of past events, we chisel off what seems less significant. Once assembled, memory becomes history (via archive), but the chiselled dust is as much a part of that history – perhaps buttressing it at its roots, as breath does with the body.
Look at that tree! Look at that twist of roots. I’ve never noticed that before, isn’t it wild?!
It was ‘the forgotten’ that was of special interest to me, considering the gap, as it is in the so-called forgotten that we find the resonances and traces lingering on the somatic and kinaesthetic level, as feelings rather than facts. The inexpressible and ‘on the tip of the tongue’. The moments, events, encounters that have brushed against our skin and left a ripple of vibration on it, forming impressions that weren’t fixated cognitively but have endured as marks embellished on a deeper sensorial level.
Sensations hold so much history. They persist, without our full awareness. We call it forgetting.
The sensation of that nice dance floor against your skin. The sense of an exhalation or softening into that sense of support. And spaciousness that comes with space that’s equipped for dancing and wants you to dance there.RN
Ira Ferris
As they recall, they are back in their bodies, feeling the memory. They, the holders of most intimate history – the Critical Path dance artists to whom every nook and cranny of this space feels fairly familiar on that deeper kinaesthetic level, even if the specific memories (the hard drive data) faded away. They are Critical Path, and the source of the archival gap I felt missing.
In attempting to fill in the gap, I was interested in prodding a specific kind of remembering. I wanted to capture the atmosphere; immortalise the ambience and the impact of the space – the Drill Hall – by accessing its resonance in the bodies of those who have danced research here.
… a feeling of potential that’s supported or triggered by the vastness of that big space. It’s like the size of the space is filled with possibilities and history...
It’s a sensation of, in one way, being small because the space is so big, but on the other hand, feeling big with possibilities that are multi-directional. There’s something also about bare feet on that plastic black tarkett, and there’s something about the blackness of that tarkett that is…. Like, it’s not a clear, defined surface, because there’s reflection in it, so that also produces another dimension of potentiality, because there’s, ummm, … it doesn’t end. LT
Eleven one-on-one conversations, each lasting roughly 2 hours, unfolded using the same format: The Questionnaire.2 We met in the southern part of Rushcutters Park, from where you can’t see Drill Hall.
I wanted to observe what is remembered before we get to the building, before contact with the features of the space inspires remembering. Here, away from Drill Hall, I asked questions aimed at somatic, sensory, kinaesthetic memories. Q: I would love to ask you to draw your usual pathway through Critical Path, within one typical day in Drill Hall, from the moment you arrive to maybe having a lunch break or whatever you do, until you exit the space.3
Q: What colour do you associate with Critical Path?
…black and greys and shadows and skin colours PW
…mustard yellow
…like yellowy cream heritage… yeah, heritage colour
… yellows and golds, which are this kind of weird reflections off the roof, meeting the light, meeting the sunlight JM AG PW
…the black of the floor and the black of the curtains
…a shiny black, a reflective surface NH MDA
(I did a project with Marilyn Miller; an Aboriginal project called Quinkin. And I do remember Earl Rosas was one of the performers and he always used to go rogue, and he had some red dirt, and he danced with this red sandy dirt; we all got chafed legs because of it, because he wanted to use this red dirt which wasn’t regular, like ochre, it wasn’t a powder and soft and beautiful, it was hard and gritty and sand. And what happened was that now you can go to a certain area over there, and from one of the earliest performances … it still has like a scar, a red dirt scar, just walking into the bathroom.)
Q: Is there a sound you associate with Critical Path?
Yes, that freaking toilet!
… like, the fans in the toilet
(I have a memory of the fan being left on all the time in the bathrooms and just being driven crazy. Actually, I think I interrupted a performance that I did to turn off the fan, because that was driving me crazy.)
Please turn it off, everyone. Please turn it off.
… the sound of the rain on the tin roof and how when that’s happening, it’s kind of deafening and it creates a little safe haven, where you can really be just with your own body, you can’t communicate because it’s just too loud.
(One of my funnest memories, moments in that space was a Performance Space residency that was at Critical Path, around 2007, with Jane McKernan and Brian Fuata, and there was this moment where we all stood in a triangle with microphones, and we were doing some kind of improv performance where we were all speaking. I have no idea what we were saying, but we were all on fire. We were just firing off each other. And at the same time, there was this intense noise of some incredible electrical storm. It was so electric in the space. We were all … yeah, I have no idea what we were saying, and it might not have been very interesting, but the feeling was so… We were just so excited. And we might have had the lights off.)
Ira Ferris
Would you like the lights on or off?
Let’s keep them off. I think it might help with memory.
And the curtains pulled away?
Maybe we should open some…
Shall we open some windows?
Oh, if you open the windows, then you have to shut the windows. Aren’t we too hot?
Quite hot, isn’t it.
I’ll open these ones because then we’ll have a breeze…
The moment you open the windows, it feels as if the life around you spills into the space.
The sound of the breeze, when the windows are all open.
… also the sound of people sticking their heads through windows and just trying to either ignore them or have to do something about them. Yeah, that is also a sound of Critical Path. Sometimes the sound from whatever we’re working with will balance that out, but sometimes it doesn’t.
… that’s quite unique, because a lot of studios are more private, and something about it is so nice because when there is a general public looking in with curiosity, it helps you reflect on what it is you’re doing and what a particular decision is to… or activity is to dance.
From the park, we walk towards the Drill Hall, a journey of roughly 10 minutes, if walking leisurely. It felt fitting to use this time (and the sensation of walking) to ask questions about the impact of Critical Path on their practice or choreographic thinking. I was curious if they could remember a specific revelation or an interesting conversation they had in the Drill. Or, what wouldn’t have happened in their career or their life, if not for Critical Path…
… I mean, it’s really hard to know what leads to what. Sometimes it’s a really winding journey from one thing to the other… AG
… it was a bit of a whirlwind to come to this place where everything was considered and talked about and thought about, and there was a lot of intentionality behind making work.
… it’s unique that as a younger artist, you were asked to articulate a methodology, you were encouraged to think about choreography in relation to research and conceptual rationales, in a way where rigour and depth of research were valued… Whereas, as an artist at the moment, I often feel like my task in communicating around my ideas is how much can I simplify it, how can I make it more accessible and more neatly packaged.
… the idea of choreographic research, which Critical Path has put on the map, at least in Sydney, … the whole discourse around what research is, as opposed to a creative development, ...
… how to search for what you wanted without knowing what it was, … how to instigate a search, create the space for something to happen.
Being around so many different kinds of projects, people’s choreographic interests opened my understanding of what aspects of choreographic practice one could focus on. Sometimes it would be into the nature of collaboration, or it could be the relationship between performance and lighting, or it could be the choreographic vocabulary.
RN RN
… a lot of quite amazing female choreographers and semi-academics working in dance, introduced me to a field that had a relationship to philosophy or various cultural studies, as well as somatic approaches to movement and improvisation practice. And then I had time to figure things out, to understand what my particular points of interest were.
… going through ideas and just doing them, just having a go … following a path with curiosity.
Ira Ferris
… and because of the framework of Critical Path as research, experimentation and play, it was really such an incredibly supportive experience; a chance to experiment without the pressures of making work. And there was something in that emphasis on experimentation that gave me the freedom to go to ridiculous places … push to the edges of things and question what was possible. It really supported me in developing my own work. LT
… as an indigenous artist, to be able to play and do research and be let in; to have my practice counted amongst those other practices, was really important…
I’ve seen my career change from being an emerging choreographer to being considered an elder within my community. This has happened through the duration at Critical Path.
1Lupton, Catherine. 2012. “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle.” criterion.com/current/posts/498-chris-markermemory-s-apostle
2The Questionnaire can be found on: artemisprojects.com.au/vignettes-flickers-fades
3Remembered Pathways exercise was inspired by a similar exercise offered by Elia Bosshard in Ferris, I. and Bossard, E. SPACE BODY HABIT. Sydney: Frontyard, 2021, p98.
Nikki Heywood
Nikki Heywood DCA lives and works on Gadigal, Bidjigal and Birrabirragal land. She is an interdisciplinary artist working across dance, performance, writing, sound and live art since the 1980’s.
A place – that is to say a collection of rooms that are joined together –walls and windows and doorways and passageways –
Wooden boards that sound and creak – like a (mother)ship – and light and air that moves through – and out – and back in – across a day, a week, a month – and one particular room a generous expanse with a black shiny floor that doesn’t reach the walls – mind the gap – and a ceiling too high to touch and a particular smell that is hard to name.
A place that becomes so familiar and yet offers each visit, each encounter anew.
A place that becomes a studio, a laboratory, a learning place, a meeting place, a gathering ground, and presents the questions – what if? – and if that, what then? – but foremost – what is the question?
A place – where the people and the things – the research – that they do together has an accumulation over twenty years – where temporary communities bond, interweave, exchange and then disperse to reconfigure at other times.
Remembering is not a neutral activity – it has textures that cut or abrade –tastes that are sweet or stinging – some pleasure and some pain – regret for things said or not said, for things tried or not tried – satisfaction for courage and companionship when the work achieves flow – and then the perplexing phenomena of forgetting.
I can’t remember all the faces and names of the people I’ve met and moved with in this place over twenty years – nor all of the circumstances and duration.
Early on there were groups brought together for Live Art adventures –activist multi-disciplinary UK artist Bobby Baker had us throwing down paint and food and gooey substances onto large sheets of paper – a reminder that the domestic body and supermarket shelves yield provocative and messy material – finding art in the everyday –who else was there?
Performance duo Lone Twin (also from the UK) took us wandering far and wide navigating the local area and inviting new ways to move and configure as a group in the public domain – there was talk of participatory potential – and duration – what did we do?
NZ choreographer Carol Brown and designer Dorita Hannah opened the construction(s) of a poetic imaginary
Nikki Heywood
with evocation of Penelope and the Odyssey and participants laying long be-draped tables as sets with infinite and mythical possibilities – I remember an intriguing and abject offering, with a table as slab, in a newly found concrete shower room, in the south east of the building, but again the memory is blurred – what happened?
Belgian choreographer Hans Van den Broeck (assisted by Kathy Cogill) set up a series of rooms within the larger room – demarcated with tape, I seem to remember – and each room held a different proposition for a behaviour with oneself or another – a house and its inhabitants where new codes apply to create an exhilarating dynamic –and I seem to remember blindfolds? What were those propositions? That group – with some additions and some departures – committed to working with Hans over the next few years, creating works Settlement and Nomads and Homeland (a short film) – these were intensely memorable – I haven’t forgotten.
Ros Warby (in part channelling Deborah Hay) with choreography as a perceptual and philosophical practice – What if where I am is where I need to be? What if every cell in my body could notice the feeling of time passing, could experience its own mortality, the sense of hanging on, then loss? What if I were to dance as if every cell in my body invites being seen? What if? – A number of us were touched by this approach and went on to work further with Hay. Is a residue of this philosophy still detectable in any of our work?
Other times in that place of research, without the structure of others to offer a scaffold, finding my own way instead, sometimes with company, dancing from day into twilight and then darkness, leaving the lights off, becoming other inside as joggers and dog walkers and homecoming workers passed by just outside.
I remember that, with all that happened in this place over twenty years – with masterclasses and workshops and research projects, with screenings and showings and sharings and symposia –the definition(s) of choreography, at least for me, kept expanding exponentially. The notion of what a score could be – an object, a word, a concept, a line, a drawing, a costume, a restriction, a public action, a state of being or a series of impossible questions that keep opening new possibilities and ways of perceiving.
The Drill Hall – more specifically Critical Path within the Drill Hall – a real place and immeasurably important for our dance community’s cultural memory. Even though things are forgotten they are absorbed and digested and become invisible but integral to the shared body – in its ever changing form.
For a space about dancing, Critical Path has always also been a place of sounding, which of course means listening. Listen now for the bodies and voices that have filled the space – planning, scheming, dreaming, lamenting, inventing, querying, questioning.
Gail Priest (PhD) is a sound artist/composer living on Dharug and Gundungurra land. She has worked across performance, installation, curation and writing for over 25 years.
Import audio:
Bip bip beeeps of Martin’s timer
Scratches and scrapes of a detuned violin
Bursts of buzz
Beds of phono fuzz
Needles of feedback
Finding sounds to express Martin’s angles and extensions
Contortions, contractions
Isolations and oscillations
When Martin del Amo and I had the privilege of undertaking one of the earliest residencies at Critical Path’s Drill Hall in spring 2005, we were in a state of potentiality. Our collaborative relationship had begun a year earlier with Unsealed (2004). I entered late in the process, the work already mapped and made; I simply responded to what I saw. For Under Attack (2005) I began work earlier in the development, but still only after Martin had progressed his idea and choreographic language to a particular point. We had always been working in the service of a public outcome, so in these wonderful few weeks, we experienced unpressured time to truly explore the way Martin’s
moving body inspired the shaping of my sounds; the way my sounds could push and pull at his body. It was utterly transformative to both our practices.
It was a curious music I was making then, full of awkward lumps and dubious innovations enforced by my own limitations. But together we learned each other’s pace and phrases. Together we learned how to sustain and transform ideas not always in synch but in sympathy. We also learned this curious new space; a place filled with the ghost sounds of marching feet in militant precision, now a home for the ever-bending body and its subtle and symphonic sister sounds.
Import audio:
Fragments of music box melody, looped and loping
Rubbery guitar glides for slow-motion slides
Rustle and scrapes, drone and ping ring
In midwinter 2007 Nalina Wait invited me to join her and Jane McKernan in a choreographic exploration of the Drill Hall and its surrounds. I remember we got excited by small rooms (that could be heated) and even smaller sounds – chocolate wrappers, plastic bags, salt grinders – how textures could be danced. We moved the audience around to various locations. Outside for a semaphore section accompanied by
a mutilated music box version of ‘You Are My Sunshine’; a duet in miniature in the tiny archive room with people peeping through the window; and a glorious slow-motion sag and slide down the stairs. With audio equipment on a trolley, I would hot-plug into different speakers in each location. Site, scale, textures shared across sounds and bodies in gentle and polite play culminating in tea and scones on the balcony.
Whirr, click and flick of Super 8 projectors
Piano stabs with long delays
Sounds to accompany still images of moving bodies
Sounds to honour both the performers and the photographer
How to hold a movement
How to hold a moment
In 2009 Heidrun Löhr was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Critical Path. The Archive Project was the result of her Australia Council Fellowship which allowed her to digitise her enormous, historically significant archive of performance photography dating back to the late 1980s. Heidrun created sequences of images that were projected on vertical scrolls hanging
from the Drill Hall roof. Bends and blurs of bodies loomed large capturing the impermanence of performance. Heidrun asked me to compose a soundtrack which I called ‘Memory Machines’, based around the rhythms and rasps of slide and film projector (fittingly recorded in Berlin), and melodic fragments emerging and subsiding. A music of reaching back, holding, dissolving.1
1For an excellent account of this exhibition see Virginia Baxter’s ‘Calling the shots’ in RealTime #92, 2009, realtime.org.au/calling-the-shots/ Gail Priest
Import audio:
Whoosh clank of curtain hooks
Thwump of heavy wool drapes
Whine and suck of vacuum tube
Buzzes and hums of the electrical box
Bringing the outside in
Dog barks and jogging feet
Clink clank of the crafts of the leisure class
Snap crackle hiss of underwater worlds
In my most recent time at Critical Path, visual and performance artist Katya Petetskaya asked me to join her in a one-week exploration titled Unveilings / Wonder If. The intention was to explore the Drill Hall, its objects and their sounds as creative collaborative partners. Katya entered total immersion, enfolded in the
curtains, enchanted by chairs – even the vacuum became a reluctant dancing partner. I sampled the sounds of Katya sampling the building, as well as its surrounds, to create a sonic weather to hold these subtle and curiously seductive images.
Working with Katya felt like the completion of the circle that began with my first experience of the space with Martin in 2005. I was learning again how to sound for a new body, but in a space now rich with the ghosts of 20 years of explorative actions.
Egotistically, listening back, I have only reflected on my own sound making, but there have been so many other moving sonic environments that have been conjured here. As a space dedicated to exploration, the annual programs have always included interdisciplinary experiments in dance and sound, dance and film, dance and interactive media. A few memories that spring to mind: Tess De Quincey’s ImproLab that brought together some of the finest sounding and moving improvisers; Nikki Heywood’s
dynamic and always surprising relationship with experimental double bassist Mark Cauvin and videographer Samuel James; Matthew Day and James P. Brown’s epic underworld where edges of bodies and speakers were tested.
Listen too for the distinctive accents and cadences of each of Critical Path directors – Sophie Travers, Margie Medlin, Julie-Anne Long, Justine Shih Pearson, Claire Hicks and Agnès Michelet – as they, in words spoken in sound, body and soul, encourage grounding and taking flight. Over the last 20 years there have been so many bodies learned, unlearned, relearned, sounded out and listened to. My full-bodied ears eagerly await what sounding bodies the future brings.
Maybe I’ll tell you about that memory when we get into the space … Because it’s spatial, and it’s particular to an object. LT
Q: We will walk into the building now and I will ask you if you could take me through the space – our last destination being the studio itself – and if any parts of the building bring up any memories, please share them with me…
Once in the Drill Hall, the process of remembering took a different density –the spatial features assisted associative memories, evoking occasional nostalgia. But the memories now also seemed more confined, locked by the space. Less dreamy, in a way. Mixed with realities of fresh awareness.
There is a particular smell in the air that’s really unique to this building. It’s slightly musty, woody. It’s not a bad smell. You can smell that it’s an old building, somehow. Maybe because there’s so much wood in here as well. It doesn’t smell synthetic or chemical. Feels wholesome. It’s a wholesome smell.
… it's kind of a bit dusty, the smell. This sort of feeling of time within it…
Ira Ferris
I have so many memories of coming in here, about to go in to watch something or meet people.
The thing that I very strongly associate with Critical Path is getting in. So, you know, whatever that alarm procedure is. It’s that initial going to the left…
Oh, the alarm is a bit funny. Let's start there. Like, oh, shit, what's the code?
… back in the earlier days, there was a big table here in this foyer area with lots and lots of flyers and I remember I could put my own flyers. And I always stopped and looked at those flyers. Was great, because there weren’t a lot of places to find out what was going on, on the bigger picture… It was quite important at that time. That was back 10 years or more ago.
… You’re right. Going into the space really helps. Otherwise, I can’t remember.
The kitchen table. Lots of memories here. It’s a bit emotional, really.
... It’s an interesting space, the kitchen. A place to relax and digest food and also digest things that have happened in the main space.
The kitchen is quite iconic in the sense that a lot of time is spent in the kitchen, especially when you’re working with others.
… we would hang around the kitchen table, everyone would have their lunches, and sometimes you would get stuck in a conversation. It felt like a very fruitful place where things did sort of come from small conversations in the kitchen… PW
But also, there’s been difficult conversations that have happened here, about the health and well-being of the dance community and the arts community in Sydney; how difficult and challenging it is to continue as a dance artist in Sydney, with the cost of living. How precious it is to access this space, and a lot of appreciation and gratitude for being able to gather here and share practice and support one another in just listening to the struggle.VH
Green Room. The couch room with the crochet things… … you go in and you take a bit of respite…
VVH
… I feel like I spent time napping on these different couches… … and this space just feels full of people, which is interesting, because when you’re here doing something on your own, it feels quite solo, or in a particular group, like a little cell. But these transitional spaces feel full of people that you would bump into. PW
… this is also used as a change room, getting ready for whatever it is you’re doing in the Drill, or what you’ve just done in the Drill. And you relate to people in that way, saying hello and saying goodbye.
MDA MDA
(Okay, this room … pretty powerful memory, because we had Aboriginal dancers coming from Western Australia, from Northern Territory, from across the ocean, and it was that morning, if you remember, it was in 2009, and I remember waking up feeling very excited because it was the beginning of the indigenous choreographic lab at Critical Path. And the sky was red. I looked out the window and the cars were all covered in red desert dirt, and the sun, you couldn’t see the sun, it was so diffused through the atmosphere. And arriving here with Rachael, Dalia, Charles, Serge… I think there’s probably 12-13 participants. All of us sitting around here in a big circle and basically the floor was covered in the very red fine earth that had travelled from WA. There was this big windstorm that had blown over, and everything was covered in desert dirt. It was sort of spooky and wonderful. Yeah, we’re sitting right here in a big circle. I don’t know why we’re sitting in here and not in the dance studio. Anyway, we were here and, yeah, just like tracing our little squiggles in the dust, making patterns on the floor while we were introducing ourselves. And we were talking about how at home the mob from WA and from Northern Territory felt being here. Was very cool. And that was the beginning of our three-year project, the first year of the indigenous choreographic laboratory.) VH
… this is the heart place where everyone greets each other, if there is more than one person, and we have cuddles and exchanges about what we've been up to, and I just love love love love all of that. There's such an excitement in this space, whether it's a public event with lots of people or a few dancers greeting each other after not seeing each other for months…
… for events and showings, this becomes like a foyer where there’s drinks and I do like that experience of how this space sometimes is a change room and sometimes is a much more representative kind of foyer where people chat in a different way...
There's just so many bodies and clothes and belongings and whatever that have been distributed around here.
… you get to lie down, and you could have a little nap, … and it’s the time just before, that’s the most useful.
Because then, when we go over to cross that threshold [from the Green Room to the studio], it’s a slightly different feeling. It’s getting more focused on the work at hand. You know, we’re ready to work.
… coming in and breathing and going, oh my god, I’m buggered, but just committing yourself to being in the space, and you just have to take a deep inhale and go: Right, I’m in! And you have to pretend that you’re excited until you become excited, and then you are excited and you forgot that you were tired, until lunch.
Bzzzzzzzzzzz. Lights on.
… another sound that I associate with Critical Path, is this very particular sound when you turn the lights on and it goes like, boom boom boom boom. And then a little bit of this electric sound.
… that kind of feeling like you’re getting electrocuted when it turns on, and the way that it takes time; it goes from dim to bright.
I’m just going to adjust the curtains so that they cover the sprung floor. That’s better. Black curtains, black tarkett.
VH
… a ritual of entering. There is a sense of preparation –opening the curtains to make it inhabitable… You’re preparing the space. And there is a ritual in that.
I like to open the windows. Open all the windows… Sweep the space before I start, put on some music, lie on the floor for quite a while… releasing on the floor…
I’ve also mopped this floor multiple times, and it’s such a large surface area that I remember getting blisters on my thumbs from the mopping.
Remember lying on the floor, trying to catch whatever had just happened, and not staring too closely at these lights, because they kind of feel like they penetrate your brain. If you look too closely, many suns oscillating up there.
Ira Ferris
Mythical and mystical at once, memory is occasionally rigorous, lucid and loud, and frequently frail, disjointed and sketchy.
It’s funny talking out loud, as I’m remembering; it’s very rambly. Sometimes sharp, sometimes it fades. Sometimes it is condensed, sometimes scarce. Sometimes fast, but often slow and laboured. Insecure and patchy, incomplete and misty. It flickers and fades. Sparks and recedes. Memory can stick or evaporate.
Oh, my God, I really can’t remember.
I remember doing a workshop. Oh, no, that wasn’t here!! Isn’t that funny, but it feels like it was here.
Memory confuses and avoids the narrative structure, messes maverickally with chronology, tricking the logic of time and finding its own flow of events. It choreographs a sequence through feeling rather than fact – following the rhythm sensed by the body, instead of imposed linearity. Remembering includes glitches, jumps and skips. Memory is playful.
The first three words that come to my mind when I think of Critical Path are: Play. Expansion. And… Naughtiness. Naughty play, naughty expansion, expanding through play. Having that feeling where you’re cheeky. That to me is a part of creativity, when you’re in the cheeky space. Because that’s where the Trickster is. When you’re playful, you’re at your best. That’s when the best kind of thing happens. It’s when you think you’re working that it becomes a drudge.
Mischievous but also incredibly intelligent, memory reorders time. It processes the past into the new logic of connections and associations – a fragmented mosaic of reshaped temporality.
… and I think I was talking about it earlier, where I’m like, I don’t think that’s my memory, I think that’s someone else’s memory, or it’s my memory of this person, but actually it’s in a different space, … … like, it feels it could happily easily belong here, in this space, to the point where you’re not quite sure whether it’s real or not… … maybe it’s one of those things that you wished you were at but you weren’t, or something… You design it.
Susan Sontag observes that a story (about a memory) “faces two directions: one is connected to truth and the other to fantasy.”1 As I listen to their memories, I wonder what is more truthful or accurate: how something is remembered or what in fact happened. Aren’t the connections made between events, via feelings that remain, more truthful than any other chronologically accurate sequencing? Aren’t they revealing more about what the moment meant rather than how a detached onlooker would have captured it, or a camera recorded it? Aren’t we establishing truths through insights gained with some distance from an event – a temporal vantage point from which new sensings can be made. It seems to me that memory outsmarts us. It does not make sense and yet it is full of it.
… IS THERE A FICTIONAL MEMORY ABOUT THIS PLACE, OR A SPECULATIVE ENCOUNTER THAT HAPPENED HERE THAT YOU COULD SHARE? SOMETHING THAT FEELS REAL, SOMETHING THAT COULD BELONG TO THIS SPACE, EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE IF IT HAPPENED HERE OR SOMEWHERE ELSE?² CONTINUES
¹Youtube. “John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell A story 1983.” Accessed 6 September 2025. youtube.com/ watch?v=MoHCR8nshe8
²One of the questions in The Questionnaire was: What would you like me to ask the next person I talk to, without knowing who that is? This one here, offered by Patricia Wood.
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”*
Alexandra Harrison
Alexandra Harrison is a trained anthropologist who has never practiced and an untrained artist who has practiced for 27 years. The list of people she would like to thank is very long and comes in the form of a prayer.
*What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to is a key note(s) address where the key note is love. It was composed as a multi-vocal choreography for the occasion of choreographic research centre Critical Path’s 20th anniversary, and delivered at Drill Hall in March 2025. The title of the lecture comes from the contribution of the artist Hanna Pärssinen to the work 'What’s Coming' and its adjacent 'Library of Future Forecasts', but more on that shortly.
In the beginning there is pure expectation, I can only fail said Mårten Spångberg before dancing Steve Paxton’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ in this room. Hey! Said performance duo Lone Twin at a Critical Path workshop in 2006. The piece can’t go wrong or fail because all of those potentials are already in it. It’s already going wrong, it’s already failing, it’s something that’s going to happen.
In the beginning we all take risks, says Görkem in the sauna. The end is for safety adds Kirri.
In the beginning is a way of exercising chronological supremacy, says Omar El Akkab. Yes, replies Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, the victor gets to say where the story begins. The victor has narrative control.
Let’s say this is a beginning, there are many, and also a return. This might be the first time I have publicly acknowledged this particular country, the Gadigal and Birrabirragal country on which we gather. I now live on Wurundjeri and Taungurung country, on the border as my son says. A child was born here, sings Archie Roach. What more do we need to know? I wonder. Beginning with Country can’t do everything but undoing the narrative power of colonisation is something. I went to NORPA to facilitate a Critical Path laboratory, shortly after Lizzie Thomson, Sonya Holowell and Melanie Herbert made ‘Acknowledging Country Through Soft Tone’, an audio work initiated by Critical Path for Woollahra Council and Blakdance. What might this whole-hearted, full-bodied Acknowledgement of Country from kinaesthetic selves who charge the landscape with presence issue forth? The function of softness is to open you into a reciprocal relationship with the world, says Lizzie. The workshop was titled ‘Landscape and Choreography’ so I offered the audio work as a way to
Alexandra Harrison
begin. The participants were so taken with it that it became the ground for the whole workshop. Acknowledging Country became a way to begin and a way to proceed.
Can you feel it? Asks Archie Roach. Yes, we replied to Archie and Lizzie and Sonya and Melanie, and committed to practising acknowledgment every morning. Inspired by their work I write a thesis on embodied Acknowledgment of Country.
Here we are. Just beginning and there are already so many threads. Let’s continue. Maybe you live here in Sydney. I used to live here. Before I moved to Victoria and began rolling the Public Sphere. I come back often. But why am
I here now? We need a map for these kinds of returns.
Agnès, Critical Path’s current director, was in the archive. I couldn’t be on the screen anymore, she said, and dwelling in the gloom of the archive I found you . She means she found a program of ‘What’s Coming’, my fourth research residency supported by Critical Path. It is serendipity, she says conjuring what cannot be summoned on demand.
I have inherited the fun of celebrating 20 years of Critical Path. I have no money to do anything. But I want to open the doors and think about what was and what’s coming, she tells me.
What’s Coming – an origin story
‘What’s Coming’ began as a conversation I had with an 84-year-old woman called Daphne Kingston. I was sitting in Daphne’s kitchen drinking tea and eating biscuits and she was telling me about her 35-year-long practice of documenting architecture in the Sydney basin; old jerry-built slab huts, farmhouses, barns and fences. She would return to properties year after year and draw them in their various states of disrepair, renovation, demolition. Prior to this she had been a visual artist but she shifted her practice as she became disillusioned around the 60s and 70s by the commodification of art. I asked if this commodification was something she could articulate at the time or was it something she perceived only in hindsight. Oh no no no, she said, I knew it at the time. Coming events cast their shadows you know. I was struck. Coming events cast their shadows. I got myself a bowling ball for an oracle and an owl costume to read the shape of movement to come and predict dance futures.
An emergent prophet? A future forecaster?
Reading the future requires the future and it is the peculiar temporality of fate that complicates divination: all possible avenues and outcomes are pre-existent potentials that remain concealed and unrealised. They emerge into conscious
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”
or actual realisation only at the moment of a chance intersection with a specific occasion. It is in the element of chance that Walter Benjamin identifies the danger. Benjamin poses a form of divination based on presence of mind – or more precisely bodily presence of mind. This presence of mind is incorporated in the future and is its inner intimation of what is to come. The ability to read the future depends on the danger of being too late and missing the chance.
I think Daphne was saying the same, coming events cast their shadows and those shadows are always moving. We have to be really present to notice what’s afoot and read the shape of things to come and it’s not the most obvious thought – that the future needs attentive presence.
You have time to decide how you want to come back, says Agnès.
The invitation to come and speak at Critical Path was both hilarious and terrifying. It was hilarious because the research ‘What’s Coming’ became a ‘Festival of Future Forecasts’ involving over 50 local artists and community members at Dancehouse in my new home of Melbourne; it was a shameless attempt to form relations. But what was coming or what happened, appeared at the time to be absolutely nothing – I mean I had a baby, which was definitely not nothing, but in terms of building community, in terms of dance in Melbourne, it seemed absolutely nothing. Nothing until the phone call inviting me to return to Sydney to give a keynote address. All that work to find a way to continue in Melbourne and what ended up happening was, 13 years later, coming back here.
By way of preparation, I read over my correspondence with Daphne in the early days of creating ‘What’s Coming’. THRILLED TO BITS to receive your email, she writes. Oh yes I would be very honoured to be mentioned and you have my permission to say whatever you wish....trouble is need more than one lifetime....as I’m finding as life becomes so interesting.....and am running out of time. I realised the performance ‘What’s Coming’ was, for her, unexpectedly and almost too late, what came. The work (and perhaps every moment) is connected to what was as well as what comes, and I see the continuities run always all-ways.
I’ve called you and you’ve answered, said Lizzie when she telephoned on behalf of Agnès.
And it was terrifying because I love you.
Part of the final iteration of ‘What’s Coming’ was a ‘Library of Future Forecasts’ where I invited people to contribute their readings of the future. Again in preparation for being here, I spent some time looking over this collection of forecasts from the past. Artist turned director of the Tasmanian ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying Navigation Service’, Nicholas Hobbs, sent a painted SOS from lost islands submerged by rising seas. Choreographer JulieAnne Long sent me a message in
computer code titled ‘technical details of permanent failure’. When I tried to decipher her message I came up with the word ‘relaxed’, a strange blue creature fishing by an ice pond and a fancy brand of exercise bike. When I asked my dear Nonna for a contribution she sent me $10 and a card saying she hoped it was enough. Artist Hans Bildstein sent me a parcel with a shell and a note about a surfer, the future has arrived – he wrote on a small scrap of paper. Simone O’Brien says the future is plastic and what’s here is knitting. There were three jokes that were all variations on the past, present and future going camping and it being in tents, or pre-tents or two tents. And then Hanna Pärssinen, a Finnish-born artist living in Hobart, contributed this proposal – Human Attempt; what will be forecast is (they wrote), what a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to.
Sitting in my friend’s kitchen telling Lee, a new acquaintance, about this key note address he asked me the title of the lecture then offered this; it makes me think of BKS Iyengar saying, when there is no tension in action, knowledge comes by itself, love by itself. Iyengar and Lizzie are surely onto something with soft tone. When I roll the Public Sphere the love flows. Oh my god look at you. I absolutely love this. I wanna make one. They say. Can I play? I love that. I love the roll. I love the roll. I love the look, the outfits, just therapeutic rolling like this. I love it. Purpose? To share the love! A man on Barkly St concludes. And
love – not adoration; love that works, that creates…love that is artistic, that makes: I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things: then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! call Elizabeth Grosz and Nietzsche together. Keep going, says everything, love streaming.
Text: Hélène Cixous writes in ‘The Laugh Of Medusa’, Text: my body – shot through with streams of song. Out there streams and here, in Sydney, a harbour. Michael Pigott wrote during one of Victoria Hunt and my Critical Path collaborations: After a particularly difficult feedback session I follow Alex outside and watch her dive into the harbour. A few days later we are stuck for ideas and going nowhere, Victoria leaves the room and enters a few minutes later soaking wet, she too had taken a little plunge. Such different performers, people said, but we put ourselves in bodies of water just the same. A common sense. Water is the element that allows the self to stream ecstatically into the world and the world to stream ecstatically into the self, write Lone Twin after they create clouds from river water. Wow! Your creativity flowing like a steady stream, encourages Daphne. More Streaming!
It was during covida and in the valley where I live there was no one to pick the grapes so we all converged on the vineyard; children, dogs, young and old. And I noticed that when we were all similarly laboring, all out picking grapes, how apparent it was that when a break was needed, it just happened. Smoko just happened, so did lunch, and the return to work was just as clear. Oh! Behold! When we are all working and moving together in this collective way the bodily experience is shared. What is felt is shared and what becomes necessary is shared, it is obvious! This is common sense. Of course! Says Lizzie. Sense, feeling and sensing together!
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”
Now I confess to you a prayer. A little delicate song.
I have missed you. Residents of Poetry Island. Artists of Sydney.
I first knew you at a distance. You are earnest and young , you said, when I first began, like a law firm you added. You weren’t being cruel just keen to see what came. I saw you over and over again at Performance Space, or sitting around the table at my friend Brendan’s house, which was really your house. Or dancing at Omeo or upstairs at that studio in Redfern where you sang that Bob Dylan song. I still just loved doing sit-ups and handstands and there you were blowing my mind with your I don’t know what this is but I have never seen it before and I love it over and over again. And there were so many of you and you all did things differently, were made up so differently. You with a camera and endless curiosity and mischief. You with an entire venue that never felt like empire. You two fearless and wild. You talking your way through Brian’s dance class. You so deliberate and surprising and singular. Your delicate eye making surface depths, you weathering everything and gathering your power, you smiling and cryptic. Berlin with you, how can conversations be so enlivening? There was no one model. You were in it together but not one and the same. And you shared the movement with me. You opened the door, showed me the field, gave me room to find for myself that we don’t yet know what a body can do.
Politics of citation, you were so very generous, thank you.
And you were courageous. Making work. The world is wide. That is a lot of exposure. The winds can be vicious. The
effect chilling. In a company it was easier to be brave. Going solo after a while I wanted to fold everything in, to hide. Then I read Hölderlin and the line come out in the open my friend. Das oferne, the open – a place beyond criticism and judgment and human psychology but something more synonymous with an animal presence. I suppose it is like the field that Rumi talks about, the field beyond right and wrong. Anyway I wanted to be there – out there like you. Rescued from frostbite by German romanticism. And here’s a trick, says Rosi Braidotti when the attack is particularly sustained, depersonalize the event and transform the negative charge.
Lost islands I miss you still.
Here is a lacuna – a space for breathing, or feeling the warmth, or the cold, or the ground. Or for swimming. Or for reckoning. You know what to do with space. I know you know. You of all people.
In the L A C U N A we can hear the beginning of Hann’s ‘Human Attempt’, just a few notes playing.
Today is the last day of summer.
Critical Path is 20 now and I remember when it began. I remember meetings with Sophie Travers, Critical Path’s first director, about what we needed. She thought we were too unambitious in our dreaming. What happened and where did it lead? How to account for all the impacts? All its pre-existent potentials.
So much invisible time, says Agnès, the reflection, conversation, plotting, dreaming, writing, doing things, the figuring out; it is almost completely lost to memory, it’s almost erasure. Oh but Agnès it’s okay! They can’t see it but it’s in our bones.
repetition as difference. And recycling and frugality! Workshops with Deborah Hay, with Ros, with Tess, with Wim Vandekeybus, I remember that fellow who came from Belgium and everybody loved him. Jonathan Burrows. Improexchanges. Sharings of research. And paid to participate! It still blows my mind.
When was the first Critical Path SEAM symposium? 2009? I have notebooks full of SEAM. Does anyone remember the lecture Brian Massumi gave at Customs House? I had to focus so hard just to stay with him. Not understand him but at least follow him. In the end I was exhausted from the effort and totally ecstatic when we landed on the couch of ambiguity on the islands of vagueness – we did all that careful thinking to end up at such a blurry and nebulous destination as the islands of vagueness. Two weeks with Lea Anderson and the perfect geometry of Julie-Anne playing Fassbinder’s bitterly tearful Petra Von Kant. Film techniques in live performance gave me the idea of theatre-in-the-distance and a 100m deep stage, which necessitated binoculars, megaphones and the comedy of performers sprinting in for close-ups. I remember Mette Ingvartsen and ‘Everybody’s Toolbox’, and the gift of her looping practice: here she says the organic and the machine meet –here the machine body produces the repetition but with the organic body there is no exactitude – only variation – an embodied practice that helped me understand Deleuze and Guattari’s
My first solo work ‘Dark, not too Dark’ (name from Martin del Amo’s drawer of titles), has its origin story in two research residencies with Victoria. We were the first recruits, Victoria reminded me this morning. The residency with Lee Pemberton and fLiNG became the work ‘Idea of South’. The ‘Handstand Project’ with Debra Batton and Heidrun Löhr led to Heidrun and my unforgettable and important but anonymous work ‘With An Emu At Midnight On A Neighbour’s Front Lawn In Coogee’.
Then it was ‘What’s Coming’ with Benedict Anderson. Margie sent us over to Nottingham. For god sakes, get out of here and learn something! (She didn’t say). I asked Claire Hicks who was working at Dance 4 when I arrived as resident artist, what do you recall of that work? I remember you being there in Nottingham and creating this world. And being very open to what’s going on around you… the poster, the dressing gown, the bowling ball… A lot of it seemed to me about being open in the world. Not at all left field of anything you have done since... she adds drily. What else came of that residency? And Lizzie’s and Jane’s and Matt’s and Miranda’s? Not at all left of field, Claire came, here to Critical Path.
It’s a lot. This place and all the people within it.
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”
How do we make sense of it? Use your hands says my collaborator Rita, involve it all. Benjamin agrees, a chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history, he writes. It’s not necessarily an easy space to exist in, says Claire. That’s how it is with ecologies, the relations are manifold and it is work to make the impacts visible. To be sure we need history… but we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away… we wish to use history only insofar as it serves living, says Nietzsche. I am happy for you to do what fits your soul, says Agnès. Okay then, come out into the open my friend, let us remember you. Cast our eyes on what was and what is to form Braidotti’s adequate cartographies, blueprints for how to continue.
WeiZen Ho, pathways, remembrances
Plunges, exits, returns, thresholds of sustainability, sweat, cups of tea. You can’t put all your milk in one glass, warns a woman on Smith St, that’s common sense.
Christmas is approaching, writes Pablo Neruda in 1973, each Christmas takes us closer to the year 2000. We poets of today have been struggling and singing for happiness in the future, for the peace of tomorrow, for universal justice, for the bells of the year 2000.
Be careful, warns Donna Haraway, Anthropocene and Capitalocene kill the conditions of ongoingness. Loss is real and ongoing. Mourning is required and it is and will be hard. The edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species. Our job is to make the Anthropocene and Capitalocene as short and thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable, epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Ongoingness is not futurism; ongoingness is full of continuities, discontinuities and surprises.
Claudia Alessi writes Grandma is 83 today she told me she feels her life will be over before or during this winter. Yes, Nietzsche reckons we should reckon with history only to the extent that it infuses us with vitality and action –I think that action includes mourning.
Winter is coming said Rosi Braidotti in a posthuman summer lab last week. Winter is coming said the t-shirt of a man on a beach in Queensland a few days later.
The cyclone makes landfall. It may look like an ending. But everything in their body, their breathing, everything expressed the urgency to go, further further further – the sculpting of desire, pure desire, the mystery of desire. Where is desire? Asks Cixous. Further, further, further, going, going, going, vital. Wow, says Daphne again. What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to. What’s going on here? They ask as we roll on. Just because?! I love that! It’s my birthday today and I just feel like I have been given a gift. Thank you, thanks guys! Love it. This is your job. It’s a beautiful job, to meet people and talk to them. I have tears now, you have really made my day. I love people, says the woman on Toorak Rd. A love that cannot be acknowledged by the empire because
it’s a people’s love for one another, says Omar El Akkad. An Altona man rings his bicycle bell shouting I love your big ball! It is marvelous!
Rolling spheres, weather, being there, death. All gestures of passing through. I still remember, writes Victoria, Wendy Morrow’s guidance around questioning 'vortexes of conclusion'.
I love your outfit said Keila when I arrived at the Drill Hall for this lecture. Thank you, I answer, I can’t tell if it is the sunrise or the sunset. It’s both, she said. Yes, said Lizzie, it’s the whole day.
Daphne died a few years ago – I received a letter from her daughter in New Zealand. When did we begin? How could it already be over? Unknowns will inform unknowns, Hann writes.
Love is in the first place common sense and common decency – and common decency is hard work, says poet Fady Joudah, committing to the practice. For the love of the world, says Rosi. Here and gone, adds Deborah Hay, with an emphasis on the here.
Lee sends me a text message with another quote from Iyengar; like a river flows forward from its source point towards the sea, life and health should move forward making it ever fresh and lively. The Public Sphere, the Critical Path streaming on their way somewhere, a place in the open, a refuge of aliveness. Bodies together, a common sense.
You’re always absolutely serious, said Angelique to me last week. You’re still earnest she meant, still so earnest.
Barghūthī, M. and Soueif, A. (2003) I saw Ramallah. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books. Benjamin, W. et al. (2019) The storyteller essays. New York: New York Review Books (New York Review Books classics).
Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic theory: the portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press (Gender and culture).
Braidotti, R. (2019) Posthuman knowledge. Medford, MA: Polity.
Cixous, H., Cohen, K. and Cohen, P. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1(4), pp. 875–893. Available at: doi.org/10.1086/493306
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (2013) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic (Bloomsbury revelations series).
Grosz, E. (2018) The incorporeal: ontology, ethics, and the limits of materialism. Paperback edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press (Experimental futures: technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices).
Hölderlin, F., Hamburger, M. and Adler, J.D. (1998) Selected poems and fragments. London; New York: Penguin Books (Penguin classics).
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī and Barks, C. (1995) The essential Rumi. San Francisco, CA: Harper. Makdisi, Saree, Makdisi, Kareem and Makdisi, Usama (2024) ‘Palestine will be liberated in Arabic’ w/ Fady Joudah. (Makdisi Street). Available at: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/palestine-will-be-liberated-in-arabic-w-fady-joudah/ id1718414647?i=1000678639795
Naimon, D. (no date) Hélène Cixous: Revoir. (Between The Covers). Available at: tinhouse.com/podcast/helene-cixous-revoir/
Neruda, P., St. Martin, H. and West, A.N. (2021) The complete memoirs: expanded edition. First Farrar, Straus and Giroux expanded edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Roach, A. (2013) A Child Was Born Here
Thomson, L., Holowell, S. and Herbert, M. (2018) ACKNOWLEDGING COUNTRY THROUGH SOFT TONE. Available at: criticalpath.org.au/resources/lizziethomson2019/
“What a stream of thoughts that begins from love can lead to”
WeiZen Ho is a Melaka-born performance deviser and artist who has a background and interest in the social sciences and experience-experiments. She has ventured into participatory, durational and material installation to capture the traces, the aftermath of performances.
pathways, remembrances
Amongst my recollections of Critical Path is the first space residency I undertook in 2011, where the contemplation on mortality shaped the search for a corporealspirit movement vocabulary; the convergence of body and psyche. I have since fragmented my practice across several strands which lean into the uncertain spaces between ritual, entity-creation methods, performance-installation and performance art. The choreographic score “pathways, remembrances” acts as both a map and a memory aid, embodying the complex interplay of my experience, shared moments, and the understanding accrued through residencies and communal engagements at Critical Path.
The score-map focuses on using the shared human language of ‘internalisation’, understood as more than mere absorption of external stimuli and rather as a dynamic, durational reconstitution of self through relational experience. Internalisation here is akin to a vehicle for transformation, where behaviours, perceptions, and emotional patterns of others become integrated within our own mental schema, often unconsciously. At the heart of this ‘experiment’ lies the possibility of reshaping our sense of self over time through relationships and shared experiences. It is a slow, ongoing remaking of who we are from the inside out. We absorb not only actions and feelings of others but weave them into our own way of thinking and feeling, often without realising it. This quiet blending process opens up space for speculation: the ability to imagine, anticipate or act as if we were another person, drawing on an inner image of their thoughts and feelings. Long-term relational bonds – familial, romantic and, in the context of Critical Path, collaborative – form the crucible wherein this internalisation flourishes. Through dialogue and shared history, individuals develop and refine predictive patterns of each other’s decision-making and behavioural signatures. This understanding isn’t perfect but is key to empathy, collaboration, and collective action.
Within the framework of “pathways, remembrances” participants engage in a durational experience of shared internalisation, centred upon the evolving community of Critical Path. The dance unfolds as a layered dialogue between ritualised embodiment, material residue at the aftermath of the performative act, and entity-creation methodologies; each embracing the indeterminacy and liminality found in the interstices of identity, memory, and collective consciousness. The performance becomes an alive archive – a performative inscription of the perceived connections and dependencies between people, objects, place and constructs. Above everything, I hope the experience can be a physical meditation on how we carry, embody, and therefore co-construct one another across the temporal folds of space, time, and shared intentionality.
Material needed: your body, your breath, your memories, a ball of string, a pair of scissors
Begin at the green mark on the left side of the map-score. Pick up the ball of string and tie it around your waist. Unravel the ball of string as you walk along the first (thin purple) pathway. At the end of the pathway, cut the ball of string and return to the same starting point. Now, using your memory, trace a similar (broad purple) path to the one just taken, occasionally diverging from the visible trail of the unravelled string. As you perform this action, try to drop into a more intimate relationship with the physicality of the place, attending to its details.
Once ready, return to any green-marked entrance and perform one of the Marks described below.
The Blue Mark: Bring to mind someone within the Critical Path community you may have grown close to. This could be through sharing space when working together in a residency, project or workshop. An advantage in this scenario is if the friendship has bled beyond the ‘work’ space. Tie a ball of string around your waist and unravel it as you move alongside the blue-marked pathway, using the internalised person’s style of movement and psychology. Your movements, as you enact the trajectory, could include a recollection of ordinary actions, situational behaviour, and/or dance movements of the imagined person. The speed and the duration of your movement will correlate. Once you have completed the bluemarked trajectory, cut the ball of spring and return to one of the green-marked entrances.
The Pale Orange Mark: Bring to mind someone within the Critical Path community you may only have had a brief, but memorable encounter with. This again, could be through sharing space when working together in a residency, project or workshop. Perform the rest of the actions in the same way as described in The Blue Mark, eventually returning to one of the green-marked entrances.
The Grey Mark: Bring to mind someone within the Critical Path community you may only have had a remote encounter with. Perhaps, this is someone you have only seen perform, or noted from afar. Nevertheless, the feeling is one of distance. It can include someone whom you have heard stories of, but never met. Perform the rest of the actions in the same way as described in The Blue Mark, eventually returning to one of the green-marked entrances.
The map-score ends once all three marks (blue, orange, grey) have been completed. The strings left in the space are the residue of your memory-actions.
Notes on scale:
The scale of the enacted trajectory is your choice, dependent on the area of Critical Path you choose to perform the score in (i.e. the dance studio, the kitchen, the entire Drill Hall, the outside of the Drill Hall, etc.).
Notes on duration:
How long you take to enact the entire map-score will depend on your choice of the space-perimeter used, as well as on who you bring to your mind to internalise. Your memory will affect the pace of action, as you take on the vibrational rhythm of the imagined person, layered with your own personality.
Notes on the above map-score:
Indicates following the drawn pathway as faithfully as possible, whilst unravelling a ball of string.
Indicates going back to the green-mark entry and moving to the memory of the pathway just taken.
Green marks indicate entry/exit.
The blue mark indicates the movement-pathway taken when internalising a close friend/peer/collaborator in relation to Critical Path; someone you know well.
The pale orange mark indicates the movement pathway taken when internalising someone you’ve had a brief but memorable encounter with, within the Critical Path community.
The grey mark indicates the movement pathway taken when internalising someone you’ve had a remote encounter with; whom you have seen photos of or heard stories about, in relation to the Critical Path community.
Let me show you where the dirt is, because it’s just bizarre.
… Can you see how this is red. See the red dirt!? Yeah. That’s the very first performance that was ever done here. And that’s the red dirt that was everywhere, and it just took us hours… And all of the space underneath this… Because this was new, remember! This was like this… and see how it’s red! … That was our performance, Quinkin. So it always seems like that performance will never go anywhere, because it’s always here. The first performance is like scratched into the space.
VVH
Elusive as it is, memory never goes away. It may wane from the cognition but as a sensation it persists. What is imprinted/stored in the body is durational precisely because it is less conscious and therefore infrequently brought to light, where it could fade. “Unspoken feelings are unforgettable,”¹ remarks Tarkovsky in Nostalgia.
I feel like I remember the feelings, I don’t remember the specificity.
… I’ve forgotten significant moments, a lot of significant moments. They are like shadows. I know that they exist, but I can’t put words on them.
Memory as a feeling is less logical than language, made of another kind of matter – something more bodily… even, airy – therefore a gap in archival documentation. A felt-memory cannot be easily condensed into words because it was not made of words to start with, but of unfathomable impressions. It billows like a thin veil on the margins of the remembered, shrouding the marble of cognitive memory with something ghostly, ethereal. Just as “breathing is an inner dance that underlines all outer movement,”² so is the vapour of the so-called forgotten sustenance that enlivens the remembered.
…if we loosen the remembering.
Q: I’ll ask you to do a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, for the next five minutes, of the things that you can’t remember or the things that you have forgotten in relation to Critical Path. This paper will stay with you and you don’t need to show it to me.
How can I remember what I have forgotten?
You can start now.
… if you could stop writing now, and for the next minute speak what you would write next.
… all of the details of the bird songs that have drifted into the space that I can no longer remember. Details of conversations with various people in the community, before and after showings or during projects, that I can no longer remember…
I can’t remember how long I have spent lying on the floor, and what I was thinking about as I lay on the floor. All the various ways that I would get myself warm and prepared…
I can’t remember all of the details of a particular showing that I came to ... I can remember where I was sitting … but I can’t remember anything about the dancing.LT
Ira Ferris
The forgotten brings melancholy – so much seems lost to memory – but as we focus on the gap, more of the remembered suddenly pours in.
As I observe their faces, breaths, postures while in the task of remembering, it seems to me that the labour at hand stifles the ability to recall. Softening, releasing, letting go of remembering and leaning into the gravity of the forgotten, on the other hand…
… brings up the snippets of things that I can remember…
The sort of deep shade of the Drill Hall. The sense of going into an inside environment that’s sort of dark and safe and allows things to happen.
Roger Shattuck argues that forgetting is a prerequisite to insightful remembering. That we must ease our preoccupation with the past event, to arrive at it with fresh awareness. “True memory or recognition surges into being out of its opposite: forgetting,” he notes. “If an image remains constantly present, it […] freezes into habit, and can be manipulated only by the intelligence.” For memory that offers revelatory perspectives, “the original experience or image must have been forgotten, completely forgotten, a circumstance which turns the elapsed years into a true gap.”³
… but the gaps that remain are the details.
The ‘soft drive’ of memories lacks data safeguarded in the hard drive of archival documents. Our ‘memorable’ consists of feelings more so than facts – an adequate paradox, in a way, given it is the facts that are stored in official archives, perhaps allowing us to forget them. What we store in our embodied archives, on the other hand, are sentiments and sensations. They stick as sensory wounds of a sort. Still felt. Easily relieved.
… I can still picture her … she’s with a really thick piece of blue chalk, like thick chalk that you would draw on the pavement with, and she’s rubbing it on her tongue… Seeing this chalk dissolve into her tongue… Even now, I feel like I can recall the sensation of watching that, that quite uncomfortable sensation of seeing chalk on somebody’s tongue.
I remember seeing a lot of people try things and be very vulnerable, and then when they would finish, the sweat marks and the residue that would be on the floor would be these kinds of strange little impressions left.
MDA
… lying on the ground, on a sunny day, in the morning, with all the lights turned off and the sun streaming in through the windows. This almost cathedral feel of this cavernous space and the smallness of one’s own body within it. But somehow, the sense of enormity – not just of the space, but your relationship to the space.
That big black space... Like, when you go in and you’re by yourself and you’re not really sure what you’re going to do, that can be quite overwhelming to begin with. Yeah, that big black vastness. The soft curtains.
PW AG PW
Ira Ferris
Porous as the Drill Hall itself, memories spill, lingering between inside and outside, open to the harbour and the neighbourhood whilst cocooned into the absorbing blackness of heavy curtains and the shiny tarkett.
Critical Path is a bit of an aberration in this area, so people don’t quite know what to make of it… There’s lots of times where people look in through the windows… There was one residency, I remember, where practically every day, someone would come in, just walk into the building... suddenly a dog would run into the space… And then sometimes an owner would turn up, or people would just walk in... I’ve always quite liked that, that it feels like there’s some bleeding between real life and the artistic work…
… something about this kind of spaces that are in older buildings where there’s some sort of bleed between, or a sort of non-pristine inside-outside relationship.
We’re open to the elements here, to the weather, and it influences what happens inside the space. The rain when it rains is loud. The bare bones of this structure, like the fact that it’s not too insulated, I appreciate that. I don’t want it to be blocked off. It’s a porous space, to allow the weather to be what it is.
It’s a little bit of this sound… ... being in the middle of nature and sometimes you hear a car but you also hear birds. Especially in summer, when it gets quite hot so the windows are open and a lot of these sounds are coming in.
It’s one of the few places in my adult life where there’s this sound of the halyards flapping, the ropes and stuff around the boat masts … making that ding ding ding, in the wind.
There are memories that can’t be forgotten.
The image of looking back at Critical Path, the Drill Hall building, this heritage two-story building. The photographic image of standing slightly outside it, near the water and looking back at it. So, it’s the image of the building itself, which has remained unchanged, because it’s heritage. It’s not like over the time that I’ve known it, it’s changed colour or anything. It’s stable in that image of itself. AG
The memories that persist on the surface of cognition. Stark and vivid. Both cerebral and somatic. We remember them without struggling to remember. They almost scream.
Q: What is your loudest (most vivid) memory of Critical Path?
… an image of watching Lee Wilson dive into the harbour naked and then swimming out and knowing that he had to walk through the entire marina naked and back.
… when they didn’t have this fence in front of the water. In the earlier years that didn’t exist.
Yeah, and people were jumping into the water. I don’t think I’ve ever jumped in.
… I do remember Lee Wilson set fire out the front. There were some amazing, ridiculous things that he did.
The first image is of Raghav. And actually, there’s so many images of Raghav Handa… We were using interactive technology, failing abysmally, trying to make a circle on one realm that had a camera on one angle, and me saying to Raghav: Make yourself smaller. Smaller, smaller, smaller. And he goes: No, Vicki, I can’t make myself any smaller, I’m as small as I can get. And so I said: Now bigger, bigger, bigger. And so it’s me just barking commands at him, and him trying… I just remember seeing his eyes when he said he couldn’t get much smaller… And his eyes were really wide and I felt like saying: No, make your eyes small as well...
We remember the scale of things… Physical, emotional, temporal.
I do remember the kind of intensity of trying to push those mirrors around, … … And just the scale of things here, like you know that the ladder has to get so high to be useful, the mirrors have to be so heavy...
PW
Vignettes flickers fades
… I think it’s the size of the space that really alerted me to the relationship between a solo performer and the space. You know, when you are by yourself in a space, what has to happen for this to be a productive environment. It is an evocative space; the space gives you something. But there is also the responsibility to not get lost in the enormity of the space. Figuring out your responsibility for your practice, whatever form that takes.
MDA VVH
Sometimes I’ve been in that space until 10 at night, and we’ve had to be really quiet so the security people don’t come. Sometimes it’s just a couple of hours, but normally, when you go there, it’s at least six hours. It’s like a vortex of six hours… … Working really hard, working lots of hours. Loving it and hating it at the same time.
And most readily, as dancers, we remember the physical sensation of movements.
I often come in and do this running falling, because it’s a big space, and there aren’t many spaces where you can run and fall.
… it feels good to be in it running, but then I will always end up lying down for a long time.
Then come into movement…
… traversing that space…
… in some sort of improvisational context…
… and lots of other people in the space, inspired and in the middle of something.
… everyone navigating their own pathway…
… the sound of barefoot or bare skin on the tarkett, because it’s quite a glossy tarkett, so it’s quite skin on. It’s quite particular.
… everyone just sweating a lot…
I remember that we were all sweaty, but it was lovely and filled with love and work – like real hard work, sweaty-working.
… jumping up and down for hours … and then the next day, no one turning up because we had jumped a little bit too much the day before...
… and over here, I became some sort of weird oceanic creature and had that beautiful sensation of being in this blue velvet suit that could be lifted off the ground.
AG PW
… and then at some point also being like, let’s go up the road for a swim; it’s so unbearably hot.
(Oh, summer is beautiful here! I mean, we used to train so hard in the space and then there’d be myself and a few others who would come up with, let’s go for a swim at lunchtime. That was before they privatised the dock and put that big fence up there … Prior to that, you could access that whole pontoon and go down. And that lower pontoon is amazing, because it floats up and down with the tide. And I’ve got lots of memories of doing slow [bisoku] movement work down there, and the image work … And… actually, sometimes there’d be the whole lot of us, we’d all just be in a big pack and jump in and swim… So yeah, I have lots of lovely memories in summertime … Sitting there, having our lunch on the dock, after working pretty rigorously inside. And then being able to have that whole beautiful outdoor looking out thing – Harbour Bridge and the harbour.)
… hanging outside the space and looking out into the harbour and watching the boats, the masts moving. And the importance of that observation of movement in the environment, around the building. NH VH
Ira Ferris
Bzzzzzzzzz. Lights off.
I’m remembering spending time in here, into the evening, windows open, the lights off. Doing a long improvisation in the dark, with a really strong impression of the light outside, the streetlights, and the sound of people going past. And having this feeling of being in here, in the space of dreaming and imagination, and not being seen by anybody.
The potential to dream something in here is incredible.
1A quote from a 1983 film Nostalgia by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
2A quote by movement researcher and body therapist Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, taken from Instagram on 6th September 2025.
3Shattuck, Roger. “Proust’s Binoculars…” In Documents of Contemporary Art: Memory, edited by Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012, p40.
stay knowing that if they get this dance, there might be something wrong. stay knowing that if something is only to be gotten, we might all be doing something wrong.
– taisha paggett
Lizzie Thomson works in the performing arts as a dancer, choreographer, writer, sessional lecturer and producer. She has worked with many artists including Rosalind Crisp, Mette Edvardsen, Jane McKernan, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Angela Goh and Ivey Wawn.
I grab my office keys, hurtle down the stairs, dash through the kitchen, past the rolls of tarkett and piles of chairs, and into the greenroom where I turn left to face the locked door of the storeroom. My eyes, brain and fingers sort through the bunch of keys to find the correct one to unlock the door. They move the key towards the lock. I pause. Or the world pauses… I’m not sure which it is. But in this pause, time splits open. Its linear arrow-like trajectory spills into a sideways oceanic sway. I have forgotten what I so urgently needed to get and after an extended moment of recalling nothing, I wander into the cavernous, night-filled Drill Hall and I lie down.
Later, I look up the verb ‘to forget’. It’s derived from the Old English word forgieten, with its prefix ‘for-’ meaning away and verb ‘gieten’ meaning to get or to grasp. To forget literally means to un-get or to lose one’s grasp. I imagine plunging into the saltwater harbour with no further plan. All impulse and sensation. Wet with presence and potentiality.
I have forgotten how many hours all the dancing bodies have spent lying on this floor during the life span of Critical Path, but it’s a lot. Falling, exhaling, unholding, unfixing, ungrasping. Tidal-breathing bodies spilling across the black floor and seeping into one another’s porous bodies and choreographic imaginations. Consent not to be a single being, the words of Édouard Glissant arrive to me via Fred Moten2… but I already know them (albeit differently) through years of
dancing. Years and years of falling like waves into one another’s dancing and messing up the illusion of a single order. Each time we witness another person dancing, we’re watching a whole throng of invisible people moving inside that dance.
What you have here is a swarm, writes Fred Moten. Forget trying to grasp at that swarm of dance, it’s impossible. It exists beyond one place, one time, one body.
It’s December 2004, the Drill Hall is on the cusp of becoming Critical Path. We are twelve choreographers engaged in a month-long Choreographic Lab facilitated by Rosalind Crisp. We are working in pairs, dancing and responding. Ros suddenly starts calling out ‘Change! Change!’ at fast, erratic intervals as a signal for us to swap roles and to change what we are working on. It’s exhilarating. The border between choreographing and dancing is obliterated and we are propelled into choreographing live while dancing. 3 There’s no time to plan, to hold on, to control. We’re thrust into a drastic presence that ruptures our connection to old calcified habits and imperial notions of dance (forget Louis XIV). It’s no longer possible to grasp for ideas or to get where we thought we wanted to be. Forgetting and un-getting become radical choreographic tools for a kind of dance that has no end.
A. Harrison,
a stream of thoughts..." , p51
It’s also February 2017 or 2018… actually, I can’t remember what year it is, but it’s a warm summery day. I am deep in conversation with the ever brilliant (or ‘briwyant’4) Vicki Van Hout. We are engaged in a project exploring embodied practices of Acknowledging Country, initiated by Critical Path and Blakdance. Vicki is telling me about a group of women she met who tap the ground with sticks to let their Ancestors know they are here. Soon, Vicki’s vivid imagination leads her to an idea for us to crawl underneath the building of the Drill Hall and perform an Acknowledgement of Country from there, under the feet of the audience. We never do it, but my understanding of the ground is changed forever.
than-ancient sandstone now functions against its will as a border between the land and sea. It helps us forget that this land on which the Drill Hall stands is man-made. As if stealing land from the Birrabirragal and Gadigal people was not enough, the colonists here also stole land from the sea. Always grasping for more. Getting, getting, getting. I wonder if the stone longs to return to its home in the earth and the sea to its full tidal movement across this land. Is that why the sky continues raining? I keep on thinking about Toni Morrison’s writing:
The August rain is pounding on the tin roof and drenching my brain. I still cannot remember how long I, or we, have been lying on this floor so I close my eyes, crawl out the window and head towards the sea. I fold my body in half over the sandstone seawall, my feet dangling towards the land and my head hanging over the other side towards the salty water. I’m like a human bridge. I press my cheek into the stone and consider staying here for the next millennia. For a second, I worry that the locals might find my behaviour absurd. Then I remember how absurd it is that humans visit museums to gasp in awe at ancient Roman coins yet walk past this seawall built from stone that’s around 220 million years old. Have we forgotten how incredible this stone is?
Wrenched from the earth and dragged here by colonists in the 1880s, this more-
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.5
I glance down at the plastic bags masquerading as jellyfish. Then, like a misguided human pretending to be an eel, I slither slowly down the seawall and enter the water. I dodge the yachts and swim towards the other sails – those of the Sydney Opera House. My body bobs up and down on the water’s surface, wet with saltwater and rainwater. I dog paddle my way to Tubowgule, otherwise known as Bennelong Point. Tubowgule, the original Dharug name for this point, I learn, means where the knowledge waters meet. When was it that we forgot that waters carry knowledge? I gaze up towards the Opera House and try to visualise how this place looked in the late 1800s when the Drill Hall stood here as part of Fort Macquarie. So strange, this physical connection between the Opera House and the Drill Hall. Was it
Lizzie Thomson
this shared ground that inspired both buildings to welcome dance and all the exceptional people who make up our performing arts community?
A ferry passes and I accidentally swallow a mouthful of salty harbour water. Amidst my splutters, a faint sound of a woman singing drifts into my ears and I gaze back towards the Drill Hall, where I can just make out a single woman dancing before a small crowd of people. It’s Jane, dancing in red bloomers, to the voice of Cat Power.6 Tears are flowing. It’s a dance of collective rememberings and forgettings; of endings and of what’s to come; and of course, of love, a dance of love and a love of dance.
1taisha pagget cited in Ife, Fahima. 2021. Maroon Choreography. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
2Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being) Durham and London: Duke University Press.
3‘live choreography’ is a term I have borrowed from Rosalind Crisp, personal communications, 2024.
4‘Briwyant’ is the title of Vicki Van Hout’s work presented at Performance Space, Carriageworks in April 2011. I first witnessed a work-in-progress showing of the project at Critical Path in January 2008, during Van Hout’s Responsive Residency in the Drill Hall. Van Hout invented the word 'briwyant' with reference to the Yolngu word 'bir’yun'. Bir’yun means a flash of light, referring to the way crosshatched patterns create the sensation of shimmering over a painting’s surface: nma.gov.au/exhibitions/yalangbara/glossary
5Morrison, Toni. 1995. ‘The Site of Memory’, in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 83-102.
6McKernan, Jane. Performance in What Remains: Celebrating the Keir Choreographic Award 2014-2024. 17 August 2024. The Drill Hall, Critical Path.
Tammi Gissell is a long-time horizon hunter. She writes, she dances and she writes about dancing. She believes history is written every day and none more vitally than those histories written in the body.
“... it’s okay! They can’t see it but it’s in our bones.”
Alexandra Harrison, “What a stream of thoughts...", p56
I agree with Alex – Critical Path (CP) archive lives in the bones. No paper or picture can wholly record every horizon hunted down and claimed there, but I’ll share some of mine. For the rest, you can read my hips.
It must have been 2005 when I first came to research at the Drill Hall. The CP residencies were a new opportunity, and I was invited to participate in a Physical TV Co. project. I was in my third year at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). I’ve kept notebooks from every work I’ve done over the years – but I’m not sure whether they’re in Aotearoa or Australia. Such is the difficulty with material archival records – they’re only fit to hold extractions and so easily misplaced.
I can’t recollect all the other dancers, but directors Karen Pearlman, Richard James Allen and their children Jadzea & Sam were there; and the extraordinary Kathryn Puie and UWS classmate Terri Herlings for sure. I know because I locked my keys in the car when rushing to move parking spots at lunchtime the
first day. I was beside myself thinking I’ll get a ticket, be towed or fired from the project. But Terri choreographed a coat hanger and saved my actual life. Sprinting back after bawling (instead of eating), I remember the caring that Karen showed me. I had puffy eyes and a snotty nose. Some other girl was loving my distress. It was written ALL over her ballet ridden body. Karen let me eat my sandwich while I experimented. I realised this was a different kind of dancing place – a place for high thinking and deep diving. I was all for it. I’m glad CP hasn’t changed in that way.
I’m so grateful to consider what’s buried in my bones from various CP engagements over the past two decades. More than anything, I’m re-membering potent emotions and what or who evoked them and what’s solidified them since. I find my embodied CP archive fascinating for what it has decided to forefront, preserve, misplace or reject; for how it continues to inform me and frankly, how tricky it is to articulate without causing offense. Truly, transport to the Drill Hall still evokes a passionate
feeling in me because of that very first parking experience. It’s a big deal because tension inhibits movement. The walk from Edgecliff station is certainly doable. But that last leg past millionaires’ row and the sailing club is enough to take the wind out of anyone on an independent dancer’s budget. I still hate that walk and their seven-dollar coffees. Such is the nature of the embodied archive, so very difficult to leave behind and even worse for excising information at will.
So, what then of Critical Path is in my bones? Certainly not ready to remount choreography, though some phrases have never left – likely from the circumstances surrounding their creation or better, the rapture they brought in execution. What remains is the taste of silly tears cried in the toilet. My out of body flight at Garry Lester's Memorial with Kai Tai Chan’s address and Darren Green’s sobs carrying me out and back again. My mentors’ own mentor taken away – but still living in so many bones as wholly uncouth and impatient for the truth. So many ciggies smoked looking over that generous water – a perfect view spoiled by bobbing yachts and fancy people walking pedigree dogs. I’ve ripped some of my most ferocious choreography out on that back concrete accompanied by tinny clanking of sails on tall metal poles. No record but what I hold and know in my bones and that’s enough, funnily enough.
I have overwhelming recollections of treating phrases in massive chalk circles marked as ‘frozen’, ‘over the top’, ‘boiling’ and ‘revolting’ while developing Jason Pitt's MonkeyBird alongside Mark Lavery (UWS), Marnie Palomares (UWS) and Rosealee Pearson (NAISDA). That is the most outrageous and satisfying day of
my creative life and I knew it would stand the test of time as it was happening. We were on fire – each of us the physical epitome of ‘so wrong its right’. I can still perform those circled phrases exactly today, but they were some hard goings, man. I’ve never wanted to flee a studio like I did sometimes throughout that project. But I’ve never cried laughing or produced such formidable, relevant material as I did with them all there, either. You had to be in that room to earn that knowing, and I’m glad I was. It calcified into creative and cultural legs to stand on.
Memories of glossy black floor, billowing curtains and one time getting naked and honest for an audition panel about how far I was willing to go to realise a character and then seeing the parent of another auditionee peering through the window in horror. Hilarious! Another remembrance is pride at making the final four with three UWS classmates for Shaun Parker’s original Happy as Larry open audition. Huddling outside the Drill Hall, awaiting the final cut, validated our inheritance from UWS and confirmed our blessed descendance from sages disguised as misfits. I feel that again now and smirk on the inside. Our bloodlines run deep in this place. The aroma of sticky, knackered humans – in it, and for it, together – permeates. All those times equal footed, flat broke and ambitious; or having punishing masters wrapped in visionary skins. When we clung to each other, when we spread out but stuck together, when we walked away from dance and each other, and when we’ve shimmied right back – Critical Path has been there to hold us. All of this is in my bones and in my blood and guts too, holding me up, pushing me forward, swinging my hips on behalf of the history we’ve made.
I dance and remember I dance then forget, I’ve danced and remembered the forgetting –And danced forgetting too, But the knowing in my bones Brought me home –I remember, I remember, I re-membered.
The image that first comes to mind when I think of Critical Path’s early days is perhaps unlikely: a fire at the marina.
Before I explain, let me remember that things were mostly undramatic. I recall taking physical ownership of the hall at Rushcutters Bay; laying the floor, hanging curtains, buying and assembling Ikea stools. Countless coffees with NSW artists, organisations and potential partners. Late-night conversations with choreographer and director friends in Europe, calling in favours. In those early days, Sally McDonald and I were the only staff, juggling logistics and smoothing tensions with Woollahra Council, fancy residents and marina workers unhappy about the hall’s renewed activity.
One of the first research projects Sally and I produced was with UK artists Helen Paris and Leslie Hill from Curious, brought in through my personal networks. A lot was riding on their experience and that of the local artists collaborating with them. Establishing Critical Path’s credibility had not been easy, and bridging the gap between international research interests and the diversity of the local scene was challenging. Still, we brought together an extraordinary group of artists and paid them to participate in a multi-day workshop. On the final day, we were invited to watch the artists share short performances with one another. The integrity and variety of work presented in the Drill was a revelation. We were deeply moved. Then, things took a turn.
Lee Wilson led the group to the door facing the waterside, rushed through, stripped, set his clothes on fire, and dove into the bay. As flames rose and passersby gasped, he swam off between the boats, disappearing toward the opposite shore. Sally and I stood frozen, torn between fearing a yacht would hit him and anxious that the fire would spread and shut us down for good.
But Lee had stashed clothes across the bay and nonchalantly made his way home. Sally and I doused the flames, calmed the neighbours, returned to the performances, and waited – days, then weeks – for fallout that never came.
History shows we got away with it. And despite many incredible performances to come, Lee’s was the one that most stays with me.
Sophie Travers
Director (2004 – 2006)
Matty welcomes.
József and Gábor spin, masked and costumed in patterned squares of fabric. I see them from behind the camera. I see the circle of people who surround them out with I move. I see the light which captures them.
When Adelina pushes the large mirror, when Matt climbs in through the window, when Ryuichi carries the ghetto blaster into the rain I watch.
Azzam is captured on the decking. Julie by the fence. Simo when writing. Ame when reading. Cynthia resting. Cloe reflects.
Victoria burns. Alan washes. Rakini leads us to the water. Xiao Ke x Zi Han lie us down on the grass. Raghav breaks. Lizzie crawls. Ros invites the mind’s eye. Alex shapes by sound. There are stilts and skateboards. Vacuum cleaners and dirt.
Ivy and her collaborators framed and trotting hold space still thick with dust. The scent of leather, the smell of money. Across mediums and moments.
Tammi insightful, Jasmin open, Vicki honestly, Henrietta caring, Thomas ebullient, Taree respectful, Katina questioning, Carly brave. Jasmine generous. Travis energised.
I acknowledge the First People of these lands who have held and continue to hold, who dance on and with Country. Who were the first on this path.
Claire Hicks
Director (2015 – 2023)
The sound of kookaburras. … kookaburras are very, very beautiful. They make light of some very serious situations. I remember being in a workshop … we were doing a lamentation around grief and death, rituals and dying, and we were having a deep talk and kookaburras were just going off. Yeah, I think lots of us probably have delightful memories of taking ourselves so seriously and then having the kookaburras go off.
VH
Archivists fear the incompleteness, see it as a failure, but philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman notes: “The essential of the archive is its gap, its perforated essence.”1 The gap – a void or an empty space – is where the inexpressible lingers; an invisible force that breathes air into the condensed data of the archive. The chiselled dust of the sculpted history; the negative space that holds it.
“Vignettes flickers fades” is an attempt or an experiment to give form to this air; to solidify it slightly so it can be made visible to you, placed on a page where it can persist as a record in years to come. It is a love letter to the Drill Hall, a heritage building within the Woollahra Municipal Council, and a way to take the reader (today and dozens of years from now) on an imaginative tour of the space and the memories it holds.
I hope this space is remembered and can continue to be a memory and a transmission space for legacy and lineages.VH
Someone recently remarked, passing by the Drill Hall, that nothing much happens here. Nothing much!?!?! Mostly everything. Like a seashell, it sits quietly by the harbour but has so much to tell. If you bring it close to the ear and listen.
It takes time to listen; to engage with the soft memory data, the intimate stories about the significance of this space for the community whose histories we share here. It takes trust to offer memory.
Memory is precious… and also, a secret.
Do you have a secret connected to this space or place?
My answer is… No.
I know someone else’s secret. I’m not going to tell. Yeah.
What else can I say about a secret? I think it’s the secrets of how artists push the boundaries around structure and the rules. And I think that’s healthy, to question and interrogate those things. I won’t say anything more than that. I’ll be the holder of secrets.
Twenty years is a lot to remember.
… it dips in and out of clarity and haziness … feels like a big hazy field, but not an endless horizon.
More a volcano waiting to be interrupted, stirred… Once woken or shaken, a whole lot of memories burst excitingly out, wanting to be shared. Suddenly untrapped.
Do I remember? Oh, do you want to know something!?
VVH AG
(One time Louise Ahl was here, we were making these… we had this aluminium foil – meters and meters of it – and we were condensing it down into palm-sized silver balls. It required hammering it to condense it. And we spent an entire day doing this… And we had a lot of fun; that was somehow very satisfying… Then, once we made the beautiful, smooth, tiny, handheld silver balls, we decided to make a large sculpture and put things inside it. And………… only we knew that there were also these things inside.)
(I put on these legs that looked like kangaroo legs and tried to work out how to dance… Because, I remember, they were so heavy. Yeah, I remember trying to use just one or put one on my arm and one on the leg. But they were so heavy that they would take my weight off me, so I would… Yeah, it was crazy. That was kind of weird and hilarious. Yeah, it was fun.)
… we were always laughing. We were always doing stupid things… Like, after two o’clock in the afternoon, just always laughing your head off. … kind of losing it, and then getting back into it, and then feeling sorry for the person I was dancing with, because the person I was dancing with was taking it really seriously. And I was like: Oh, come on, you don’t have to take it that seriously; we’re just doing a workshop, don’t you see humour in it?
I remember working with these Japanese artists, and we had to pull in the Universe. I remember feeling like, I can’t do that. I just… I can’t even begin to try to pull the Universe in. But I did try.
(So the project with Mette … we had the workshop, and there were the mirrors in the space; the big, heavy mirrors. And she gave us a task: Make an object disappear. Which is such an impossible, fabulous proposal. And there was a mirror over here, and I brought everybody over to the mirror and invited everyone to close their eyes and stand on either side of the mirror and place their ears to the mirror and listen. It felt like we made a way for the mirror to disappear, collectively. And it really did disappear.)
It’s interesting… closing the eyes and listening. I guess that is an experience connected to dancing: a non-visual listening. Not just listening with our ears, but kinaesthetic listening, peripheral listening. And there’s something about the proportions of this space that support that, in its width and its breadth and its windows. You know, windows in every single place.
Ira Ferris
(And then I remember … standing outside those windows there, on the asphalt, we stared at the clouds and took the cloud body into our body for quite a long time. Tried to get a sense of the movement and speed of the clouds and how the air currents are moving those clouds in different multiple speeds. And then finding those multiple speeds in our bodies, to soften off our edges, to get a sense of that constantly morphing cloud that never is in one shape. It’s always changing shape. And… now I’m remembering, that moment has informed my practice massively. It’s a huge influence. The cloud and the constant transformation. Never arriving.)
… and that’s what this space is about, … trying the impossible … … a living laboratory for somatic and choreographic practice… An opportunity to research and deep dive and share without product. The value of that is fundamental to the art.
I learned how to shed. I learned how to let things go, with the hope of finding something that would be useful and take me into a different direction… Begin to think about what else was possible, and also why was that needed and what did it do?
PW
And a really big question about what is it to be here right now, creating. What is needed, and how can I align with what is needed to bring something into being.
VH
Twenty years is a lot to remember.
I just see flashcards of faces. Faces of so many people… Many artists, not just dancers or choreographers but spanning different disciplinary areas, between academics and architects, visual artists, composers, teachers. People who are just interested in movement research.
So many people. So many people…
So many people, holding so many memories…
Making “Vignettes flickers fades”, I was able to spend time with only a few. But as I listened, I got a strong sense of speaking to a community. Flickers and vignettes of memories felt like sparks coming from a single body, a collective voice – the community that is Critical Path.
… you are working within a community and whatever it is that you do contributes to something that is larger than yourself and your own practice. It is a sense of belonging; that you’re actually part of a larger community and that whatever it is that you’re doing is connected to that of others.
Ira Ferris MDA
Physicist David Bohm reminds me that assembling many views together leads to greater reality. Because any single view is limited – “like a mirror looking this way, another that way – many many mirrors; each one giving a limited view."2 Combined together, they provide a better dimensional or multi-dimensional overview of reality/history – like a choreography made of many steps and movements advancing from all corners of the space, as they do.
This ‘archive of feelings’3 is a mosaic of many voices stitched together, interwoven into a large ensemble dance – cheeky and playful, but also earnest and delightfully synchronous. Breathing rhythmically in a co-inhabited (s)pace that stretches 20 beats behind and an infinite number of beats ahead.
… a movement of transmission across generations and across disciplines and cultures. That’s that form of perseverance, resilience, continuation, and strength and stamina and creative exchange that to me is the foundation for what movement the bodies may be creating.
An archivist (of feelings) is a care-taker, not only a record-keeper. Attentive whilst gathering feelings, remaining porous to the voices listened to when organising the material into a recorded atmosphere, honouring the sentiments behind words shared. As I sculpt this text, I also remember. I draw on my memory of utterances behind the transcribed data, the memory of pauses, the tone of their voice when they said that. I consider what has lingered from the conversations, as a revelation or a surprise. I keep listening as I stitch this history – this archive –hoping to translate some of the invisible data into the sensation of reading as your eyes travel the symbols on the page.
I just think about the light and the air coming in through the windows. Is listening a movement?
It is the sound of concentration. Everybody concentrating. So sometimes it’s not necessarily even words, it’s not external sounds. Sometimes it can be the sound of everyone thinking; their thoughts are so loud. You can hear the sound outside, but the sound inside, without any music, is louder than the sound outside, so you don’t even notice the sound outside, because you’re concentrating so hard. You’re lost in something, like in another realm.
VVH
As we reflect, we refract…
… Then harvest the rays of the refracted reflections into a boisterous image(ining) of history.
“When imagination returns, it means we are back in the body.”4
Stored in fluid tissues and not the stiff data, the ‘archive of feelings’ is for the body. And for future imaginings. The ‘archive of feelings’ does not freeze time.
I can still remember the movement in my body. LL
¹Foellmer, Susanne. (2022). “The archival turn in dance/studies: reflections on (corporeal) archives and documents (reprint).” Theatralia, p137.
2A segment of an interview with Prof. Bohm in Amsterdam, 1990, conducted by Bill Angelos, youtube.com/ watch?v=LTTRka0ZM2E. Bohn says: “… by combining many views of the object, we understand the object.”
3"Archive of Feelings” is a term inspired by the name of a book by Ann Cvetkovich. She may be using it in a different sense than I am using it here.
4Quote by author Tess Guinery, captured on Instagram.
Ira Ferris
An offering from Julie-Anne Long: to be executed in the Drill Hall as a continuous score, with each proposal following on from the previous.
Julie-Anne Long is a professional dance practitioner living and working on the land of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. She has a substantial record of achievement for over forty years in performance, choreography, teaching, administration and arts advocacy. She was Critical Path Acting Director, 2006-2007.
*a broom and a mop (see ONE); *music of your choice and a sound source (see TWO); *an apple (see SEVEN); *an item of clothing or accessory to be worn on the body, to subtly suggest you have made an effort today (see ELEVEN); *music of your choice and a sound source (see TWENTY)
You will need to estimate how long you would like to take for your Twenty Choreographic Scores for Twenty Years, as you will need to invite guests to join you for the finale (see NINETEEN).
As part of your preparation think about how this exercise connects to you and your relationship with Critical Path.
ONE Preparation of the space –sweep, then mop the floor. Make it fun for you!
– create your own movement phrase to acknowledge the First Peoples of the land on which you work today, the Gadigal and Birrabirragal peoples.
The Drill Hall March – mark out the perimeter of the Drill Hall, then march the perimeter of the Drill Hall. Retrace your steps. Select music that will propel you through the space. Repeat your march. Following on… meandering –take a circuitous route through the space. As you wander ‘name’ what you see.
Take a breath, or two or three in preparation…
Making an entrance – enter and exit the Drill Hall, re-enter and exit again and again, from as many directions as possible.
Following on… a still life – stand still for as long as you feel comfortable. Invite your desired movement to appear in front of you. Follow your desired movement with your eyes.
At last a dance score, you say – create a long continuous movement phrase of flotsam and jetsam until you are breathless… Stop unexpectedly and let your body recall one piece of detritus. Repeat the one piece of detritus nine times as accurately as possible. TWO THREE
In the spotlight – where in the space do you feel most powerful? Explore… Where in the space do you feel invisible? Explore…
Breathe with awareness for as long as you like…
An apple a day – take an apple (or an orange if you prefer) for a relaxing break. Notice the weight, shape, smell, texture of the fruit in your hands. Take a walk outside in the environs of Rushcutters Bay Park, a walk with the dogs, and the joggers and the babies in prams. Take your time to eat your fruit.
Costume change – once back inside take your time to change into your costume.
Following on… rhythm – find a vantage point to watch the harbour waters. Rocking from foot to foot, allow a rhythm to reveal itself. It can be as regular or irregular as you like; this could take about 10 minutes. Continue rocking from foot to foot for an additional 20 minutes or as long as you like, or until you feel slightly delirious (use a timer).
Take a breath, or two, or three, as needed…
Time for lunch – what will you have for lunch? Did you bring something? Will you buy something? You can answer this question in a split second. For the next questions take your time: Where will you eat? – Inside the kitchen? Outside in the park? By the water? And finally, based on people you have engaged with at Critical Path, who might you invite for lunch? Select 5 people.
Impulses from the archive – sift through readily available archival documents from Critical Path’s history: a photo, a program, a written note… whatever jumps out at you… Translate the sensation or memory of the artifacts into a collection of 20-second movement phrases (use a timer).
Imagining your future – get comfortable, shut your eyes, see yourself working in the Drill Hall, see yourself practicing, see yourself performing. Devise a solo performance for the Drill Hall. Once you have a sense of your ‘performance’, proceed with a commentary describing what you see. Continue until you are happy with your future imagining. Enacting your imagining – a performance of sorts. Guests will be arriving during this time so sustain concentration on your score to avoid being sidetracked by the arrivals. Your priority is performing your future imagining until you are ready for applause (do not use a timer), take as long or as short as you need for your performance.
Following on… greetings – you have invited an indefinite number of dancers to join you at your estimated finishing time. When you are finished greet each guest and welcome them to the space. Invite them to make themselves a drink (with the ingredients you prepared earlier).
Follow on… cheers – provide the ingredients and equipment to make for 2 cocktails:
Future Dance Squad Shot:
45ml Gin
15ml Vermouth Sweet
Makes two shots (always share a shot). Add ingredients to mixing glass. Stir well. Pour into glass.
Cheers!
Dance With A Dream:
60ml Brandy
10ml Orange Liqueur
10ml Anise Liqueur
100ml Ice
Put ice cubes in shaker. Add all ingredients to shaker. Quick shake. Fine strain into glass.
Cheers!
Provide plenty of water (free from the tap) and some snacks if you like. Take your places on the dance floor. Move together in ways determined by the sound or silence that you curate.
Be bold. Have fun!
Artistic Director (2023 – current)
… tracking perpetuity in mobility, capturing split second wonder in every instant of watching.
In writing this ode to two decades of choreographic enquiry, I sign 40 years of bewilderment, accompanying moving bodies on stage, in the street, in the studios of Paris, Perth, Darwin and finally Sydney. Here, I find myself in the passing of a new anniversary.
Critical Path is 20, so young. The generation of those who dance till dawn at parties.
Dance is endurance
20 years is a generation, and my gradually appearing grey hair reminds me that, though many seasons have passed, it is important to celebrate milestones, otherwise we’d forget; we’d walk in the dark, unaware of where we come from.
Dance is memory
I am walking on the shoulders of the formidable women who have doggedly carved in the Australian landscape the possibility of a place which has resisted the temptations of a goal-orientated world. A refuge for the untameable creative process to take its course, unpressured. A philosophy which signs a pact of trust with those
we have pledged to protect, those who, no matter what, answer their calling: the Artists. A space which was born and has never ceased to be one of ideas, strong enough to keep imagining what’s coming when the collapse of systems we thought would hold forever threatens to overwhelm our mad optimism.
Dance is lifesaving
I cannot speak for all the artists who have given flesh to the Critical Path idea, to claim the idea was valid, but believe me it is! The gems shared in chance-conversations are too many to throw in a page of writing. Anniversaries can be a good time to pack the numbers and claim a medal on the podium of statistics. But this is not what the idea is about. Critical Path cares for singularities.
Critical Path Artistic Directors, to date:
Sophie Travers
Julie-Anne Long
Margie Medlin
Artists are the rays of sunshine which illuminate the greyness of my computer screen when all I can hear are the echoes of their breaths, chants, scores from the level below where the alchemy of time and space takes place unwitnessed. That is the gift of being a conspirator of something bigger taking shape.
Justine Shih Pearson
Claire Hicks
Agnès Michelet
Dance is energy
Critical Path embodies a philosophy of faith in the choreographic process. Embodying, speaking of dance, is of course an understatement. At a time when one tries to make us believe that clouds are where the data of our “real” lives sit, it is essential to offer a counterpoint on hard ground. The dance floor of the Drill Hall holds the immediacy of the corporeal experience.
Critical Path doesn’t prescribe narratives, only creates the conditions for their emergence. The narratives are improvised, keep changing, are remoulded in the furnace of the creative quest which shapes live art; by definition, never fixed and forever experienced in the present.
Dance is a quest
I feel sometimes as if living in a world of 7-year-old who never grow up and keeps asking: Why? – repeat, repeat, repeat. Artists matter. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Artists need time. Repeat, repeat, repeat. They need time to see what escapes us. Time to feel. Time to see.
Dance is clairvoyant
Since we started talking about our anniversary, words and images have emerged in waves of emotions. The dance artists have the resilience and preciousness of the most beautiful; they are those who keep us running.
To those I’ll miss, for my time has been short; those always present, my many icons, companions of every day… thank you.
Dance is heroic
What matters in this marking of time is to remind ourselves of the values which bring us together, values of care and love always, and more than ever, the value of freedom, the value of offering a space – and a very special one, where artists have the capacity to set their pace… and even, god forbid, have a siesta.
Dance is rebellious
A “sleep dance”1 emerges from the shadows of the dark space under a spotlight. Some asked what on earth does this have to do with choreography?
To which, as the good Critical Path priestess I have become, I answer, it has everything to do with choreography; it has to do with space, body and time.
Every day, every hour – that’s our pledge – choreographers cross the old doorway facing the sun. The clapping starts with the water gently lapping the skirtings of the jetty close by. Hard at work inside, they plot the unknown from nothing but presence.
Dance is peaceful
Something needs to be said about the Drill Hall, a serendipitous gift of heritage and location. Those who dreamt it and made it happen ought to have their place in the pantheon of dance champions. The vision to bring up courage has remained unaltered, from fostering those due to defend a nation at seas to building a creative nation. Ours is global.
Dance is communal
O Drill Hall, chapel of icons, vessel of possibilities, as vast as the ocean can be to inspire a dreaming soul.
The space is a flow, stands with its inside out and outside in, porous to the break of rain, the howling of the wind, the chirping of birds nesting, the engines invented by men to break the silence.
Music soars from the ceiling and the world changes dimension. Bodies at work weave the miracles which will meet our eyes in time, when a new gem is formed, the diamond shaped in a lab.
Critical Path celebrates 20 years of attempting in any way we can to offer artists what they need, not what we want. We will thrive in being a vessel, not the commander.
The future will be plural. First Nations first, we acknowledge we sit on a site of trauma, a gathering place of ancestral meaning.
Dance is healing
Happy birthday Critical Path, keep being brave, sail the seas of improbability, may you brighten our horizons for many years to come.
Agnès Michelet
eh.
Yes, yes indeed.
Every nook and every cranny has been abruptly banged against, slid across and tumbled down bent and sprawling, numerous jittery human hulls howling with laughter yowling from exhaustion as they seek to exhaust a notion a concept a belief a whimsy.
No topic too frivolous, no state of play too flimsy neither small nor magnanimous
No
Just Robust enquiry
Rushcutters Bay is where pertinent output from anatomical frameworks shoutout muscles and bones muscle in and gnatter all possible probabilities are free to walk-about the utmost up for grabs at any given moment somatic speak is paramount
Enough of this general description
Let me regale you with a scintilla but a mere scrap of more personal prescriptions and ponderings for I have been here in this corrugated enclosure expressing benefitting almost since its inception
Yes I have
Did you know….
There’s a smattering of red dirt that still escapes the small wooden bridge which bridges a small well between the studio and the ladies and gents.
It’s from a work called Quinkin by Marilyn Miller, a Kuku Yalanji woman, whereby Blackfellas first left their mark in this modern-day dancing shanty. Gently replacing the work of oarsmen whose uniformed figures still watch over us
albeit when the bulky curtains are drawn do we ever fleetingly contemplate their naval acts which preceded our comparative measured movements whilst scantily clad
In this auspicious place for cavorting skipping of prances and gambols, for Briwyant my cohort of collaborators drew dots depicting mosh pits and raves the tracks of fast cars and bicycles of the windows in the cylindrical tower atop a small pole in Centrepoint. For Long Grass we moved a square frame in circles and argued over cultural protocols.
In the path of criticality’s hot box I literally went gaga with Mr Gaga I learnt how to pronounce Goethe just before hot tailing it to the Sydney institute of that namesake to hear Sasha Waltz skirting around European funding for the arts after taking class with her company after what seemed like Soo muuuuch jumping
I heard Lepecki talk about motivation and spied Loyd Newson scowling in a dark corner trying not too hard to be seen whilst in hiatus from his regular haunt in the UK from which I heard he’d been unofficially albeit temporarily on the lam from somewhat controversially in hiding
It was here I first met Margie Medlin who arranged much more than lighting during her notable tenure. As director she will be forever remembered as an advocate for guerrilla occupancy calling at the drop of a hat to offer space that stood empty and idle, including no she had legally no right to a misdemeanor she was compelled to continue
While dressed in a white lab coat I saw my friend Karen Kerkhoven jump out a window and back in again due to a Frenchman named Cyrille Nerovique‘s workshop shenanigans.
In this mustard metallic surrounds I have never laughed so hard. Never felt so frustrated Never felt so much despair. Never dreamt I could have accomplished As much as I did.
I know I am not alone in this my feelings of gratitude that this hard playing play hard playful domain of dance exists So raise your glasses, or fists or legs as high as possible in hope Here’s to twenty more! AT LEAST!
“It's also so nice coming to the Drill who haven't been here before. Because little secret space, hiding in plain it's nice to host somebody here – when like, yeah, look at this amazing space
Because Drill Hall feels like such a plain sight here near the harbor. And when you bring them in and you're space in here that we get to be in.”
– Angela Goh
Dharug Land
Angela Goh
Gadigal Land
Alexandra Harrison Wurundjeri and Taungurung Land
Alexandra Spence Wangal Land
Claire Hicks
Kaurna Land
Agnès is the current Artistic Director of Critical Path (2023 – ). Migrating from France to Australia in 2000, she has carved out a career as a highly respected individual in the national dance sector. Previous roles include Program Manager and Acting Executive Producer of FORM Dance Projects, General Manager of Darwin’s Tracks Dance Company, and Director of STRUT Dance in Perth. Prior to her career in Australia, Agnès worked with a broad range of performing arts organisations in France. Agnès holds a Masters in Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design from UNSW; and is also a keen choir singer.
Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces worldwide, most recently at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Sydney Opera House; and the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. In 2024 her work Body Loss was acquired for the permanent collection of the University of Melbourne’s Art Museums, making it the first work of dance to be collected by a museum in Australia.
Alex is a trained anthropologist who has never practiced and an untrained artist who has practiced for 27 years. She has made visible lots of performance. Strange treasures disappearing into a past she can only glimpse. Today, she practices being the whale, rolling the Public Sphere and speaking blue language. She knows there is no line really and yet she is following something. Yesterday she learned to use a ride-on mower. Yesterday was long ago. The list of people she would like to thank is very long and comes in the form of a prayer.
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist/musician whose aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions, reimagining the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. She’s presented her work globally including Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; The Lab, San Francisco; Liveworks Festival, with Liquid Architecture; Radiophrenia Festival, Glasgow; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; Volume Festival AGNSW. Has solo releases with Room40, Longform Editions, Mappa, Students of Decay & Canti Magnetici, and regularly collaborates with Moss Hopkins as Banana.
Claire has worked with artists, artform and audience development for over 30 years. They are currently CEO for Writers SA. Based in Australia since 2015 Claire was previously Director of Critical Path (2015 to 2023) and Senior Curator Performance/Executive
Elia Bosshard
Gadigal Land
Gail Priest
Dharug and Gundungurra Land
Ira Ferris
Gadigal Land
Jane McKernan
Gadigal Land
Producer at Carriageworks (2023 to 2025). As an independent producer and curator, work has included dramaturgy, discourse and writing projects. They have produced and managed tours for a range of performance artists.
Elia is an artist whose work studies the construction and impact of space, place, architecture and more, through installation, sculpture and imagery using concrete, models and 3D printing, iPhone 13Pro, writing and drawing. Bosshard has presented solo exhibitions with Mais Wright, Sydenham International and Articulate. With a background in scenography, Bosshard’s design across contemporary music, theatre, opera, dance, includes work with Deutsche Oper Berlin, Phoenix Central Park with artist Alexandra Spence, Ken Unsworth X Australian Dance Artists, Resonant Bodies Festival X Sydney Chamber Opera, Siteworks Festival Budanon, Belvoir 25A, Vivid Festival X Trackwork.
Gail is a sound artist, curator and writer. Her practice encompasses performance, recording, sound design for dance and theatre, installation, curation and writing. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in France, Germany, Norway, Iceland, Finland, UK, Italy, Hong Kong and Japan. She occasionally curates events and exhibitions and writes fictively and factually about sound and media art including editing the book Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia (UNSW Press 2009). She was the Associate Editor of RealTime (2003-2015) and is now overseeing its archive. Gail completed a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney exploring ficto-criticism as an alternative approach to sound theory.
Ira was born in Yugoslavia, where she trained in contemporary dance as part of Zagreb Youth Theatre. Since 2007, her home is Eora. She is a dance and multidisciplinary artist, also working as a writer and radio journalist, art curator and producer. She co-authored SPACE BODY HABIT (2021), with Elia Bosshard. Her texts have been published in Australia and internationally. In 2024, she edited Critical Dialogues #15: TIME . Currently a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design, Ira is making and analysing “AFFECTIVE ARCHIVES: Translating the phenomenological experience of site- and time-specific dance performances through haptic and poetic methods of audio-visual media”.
Jane is a choreographer, curator and dancer. Her work as a member of The Fondue Set has been presented at Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, Dance Massive, Carriageworks, Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Dancehouse. Her independent choreographies have been presented at the Keir Choreographic Award, Liveworks, Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Carriageworks. She has collaborated with Rosalind Crisp, Wendy Houstoun, Miguel Gutierrez, Martin del Amo, Lizzie Thomson. Jane has a Green Room Award (with The Fondue Set) and won the KCA Audience Choice Award 2015. She has benefited from the support of Critical Path across the last 20 years through their responsive residency program, workshops and labs. Jane is currently Director of ReadyMade Works.
Dharug and Gundungurra Land
Linda Luke
Dharawal Land
Lizzie Thomson
Gadigal and Wangal Land
Martin del Amo
Gadigal and Wangal Land
Nikki Heywood
Gadigal, Bidjigal and Birrabirragal Land
Julie-Anne is an award-winning dance artist living and working on the land of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. She works in a variety of dance contexts as dancer, choreographer, director, producer, mentor, dramaturg, curator and teacher. Julie-Anne has a significant solo practice, as well as a more communal, collaborative way of working with other like-minded artists, within the diversity of Australian contemporary performance. Julie-Anne is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts at Macquarie University.
Linda is an Australian dancer, director and choreographer. Her work aims to deepen sensitivity and excavate the subtle undercurrents we experience in relationship to self, each other and the environment. Linda has been a core dancer for BodyWeather dance company De Quincey Co from 2005 – 2025, dancing in multiple productions. She has also produced and toured her own solo pieces for Performance Space’s Liveworks, Melbourne International Dance Festival, Dance House, FORM Dance Projects, Campbelltown Arts Centre, MAP Festival (Malaysia) and Flower of the Season (USA). Linda sustains a vibrant teaching practice at the University of Wollongong and through public workshops.
Lizzie works in the performing arts as a dancer, choreographer, writer, sessional lecturer and producer. She has presented work at Carriageworks, Performance Space, Art Gallery of NSW, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Murray Art Museum Albury, Critical Path, ReadyMade Works, Omeo Dance Studio, ACO Air Hong Kong, SODA Universität der Kunste (Berlin), SÍM (Iceland) and ABC Arts Online. She has worked with many artists including Rosalind Crisp, Mette Edvardsen, Jane McKernan, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Angela Goh and Ivey Wawn.
Martin is a choreographer and dancer with 30 years of professional experience. He is acclaimed for his solos fusing idiosyncratic movement and intimate storytelling, and, more recently, as a creator of group works and solos for others. Programmed by many major festivals and venues across the country, his work has toured nationally and internationally. Martin’s contribution to the Australian arts sector as a teacher, dramaturg, dance writer and mentor to emerging artists has been recognised with the 2024 Creative Australia Award for Dance, the Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance (2018), and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship (2015).
Nikki is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary artist working with dance, performance, writing, sound and live art across five decades. Focused on presence and embodiment, her long professional practice has centred on devising and directing original performance. Over the past decade she has evolved a practice of writing from the body, creating and performing new form libretti, collaborating in experimental works using extended vocal improvisation with musicians (notably Broadcast into Oblivion with bassist Mark Cauvin). Her work lassos the existential moment (what is it to be) and drives to engage with unfolding histories and the dystopian crisis of the present with humour and occasional beauty.
Contributors
Gadigal and Yidinji Land
Rhiannon Newton
Gadigal and Wangal Land
Ryuichi Fujimura
Gadigal Land
Sophie Travers
Naarm
Tammi Gissell
Dharug Country
Patricia is an independent dancer and choreographer, based between Gadigal and Yidinji land. Her choreographic research focuses on the embodied practice of transmission, ephemerality and memory; it takes the form of radio, text and performances. She has developed her artistic practice through residencies, commissions and presentation opportunities, across Australia and internationally. Patricia has developed a number of works including, P-E-S-T (2024) with Alex Karaconji, the history project (2024) with Michael Whaites for LINK Dance Company, Sonar So Far (2023) and So Far Sonar (2022) with Alexandra Spence; Trish + Trisha (in-development); Transmission Solo (2019).
Rhiannon is an Australian dancer and choreographer who grew up on Dunghutti land and lives and works on Gadigal and Wangal land. Her work experiments with the ways dance and performance cultivate connection between people and environments. Her choreographies have been presented by Sydney Festival, Dancehouse, Dance Nucleus (Singapore), Dance Massive, Sydney Dance Company, Performance Space, and Baltic Circle (Finland). Rhiannon also works as a dancer and collaborator with artists such as Mette Edvardsen (Belgium), Martin del Amo, Ivey Wawn and Brooke Stamp, among others.
Ryuichi is a Sydney-based dance artist whose practice spans contemporary dance, BodyWeather, improvisation, and choreography. Since beginning his professional career in the mid2000s, he has performed in ensemble dance and theatre works with both Australian and international artists. In 2013, he began developing his own choreographic practice, creating site-specific, durational, and theatre-based performances, including his acclaimed solo trilogy HERE NOW. In recent years, Fujimura has expanded his work through interdisciplinary collaborations with artists across visual art, film, and performance, continuing to explore the intersection of memory, place, and embodied storytelling.
Sophie was the founding Director of Critical Path. She is CEO of Australian Tapestry Workshop. Prior to this she was CEO of Collingwood Yards. With an early career in international marketing, she transitioned to arts management and worked for a range of organisations in Europe and Australia. In dance she worked with Wayne McGregor’s Random, Bi Ma and Green Candle dance companies and Retina Dance at The Place. She wrote regularly for Real Time, Dancing Times, Dance Theatre Journal and Dance Australia. Her work with British Council took her across the world in support of British artists, and as Australia Council International Market Development Manager she was responsible for artistic projects across Europe. Sophie is on the Board of Chunky Move and TarraWarra Museum of Arts.
Tammi is a Murruwarri-Wiradjuri performer, theorist and collections coordinator, First Nations at The Powerhouse Museum. As artist and arts worker, she is committed to overcoming colonial architectures imposed on Country and consciousness, through creative acts of truth-telling across the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector. Tammi has written for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Arts, Queensland Art Gallery, Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, Performance Paradigm and the Archives & Manuscripts
Victoria Hunt
Gadigal Land
Vicki Van Hout
Gadigal Land
Zoe Baumgartner
Gadigal and Wangal Land
WeiZen Ho
Dharug and Gundungurra Land
Journal. Her newest performance work Ngara pinta-rru thirri’laa was commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW and premiered in May 2024.
Victoria’s work delves into Moana-nui-a-kiwa Oceanic epistemologies. Victoria is a dance artist, choreographer, director, dramaturg, filmmaker, and photographer. Her practice reinstates IndigiQueer futurity – grounded in Matauranga Maori and BodyWeather – within the politics of Rematriation. A founding dancer with De Quincey Co., Hunt is a leading figure in Australia’s BodyWeather practice. Her recent work, KOIWI, commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW and Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, gave form to a ’protector’ of taonga and is currently travelling the world. Victoria is the co-founder of Weather Beings, a trans/national collective with Two-Spirit Métis artist Moe Clark (Tio’tia:ke/Montreal). She is artistin-residence at Carriageworks, Sydney (2024-25).
Vicki is a Wiradjuri woman born on the south coast of NSW and an Indigenous independent artist with over 20 years’ experience. A graduate of NAISDA and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York, Vicki has performed with leading Indigenous dance companies including Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre. She was also a founding member of Fresh Dancers alongside Marilyn Miller. Her acclaimed work Briwyant was the first ever national tour by an independent Indigenous choreographer. Vicki was awarded the NSW Dance Fellowship for established and mid-career artists in 2014 – the first Indigenous artist to receive the honour – and the 2019 Australia Council Dance Award.
Across her personal and professional practice Zoe works with an emphasis on concept and world building, finding a balance between intuition and design thinking. She specialises in branding, creative direction, print and digital, as well as select editorial and portrait photography for clients across the fields of fashion, commerce, art and culture.
WeiZen has been devising and presenting open-disciplinary performances since 1999. Her practice has expanded through musicvisual concerts and movement into solo as well as participatory works which lean into the uncertain spaces between ritual, entitycreation methods, performance-installation and performance art. These works search out the interrelatedness between the body as a moving vessel for history and memory, materiality in human culture, and the psycho-philosophical culture of space and place.
Mitchell Christie, Experimental Choreographic Lab showing w/ Performance Space, 2025. Photo by Liz Ham.
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First Critical Path ENews, 2005. Photo by Zoe Baumgartner (inspired by Debris 01).
Karen Kerkhoven, Waking Dreamer. Part of On the Cusp 2019. Photo by Shawny House.
“The Forgotten” by Nikki Heywood, a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, part of “Vignettes flickers fades” project.
Rhiannon Newton, Open Studio 2020. Photo by Melissa Ramos.
Devika Bilimoria, Experimental Choreographic Residency w/ Performance Space, in-development-sharing, 2023. Photo by Sarah Kukathas.
Lian Loke, Experimental Choreographic Lab showing w/ Performance Space, 2024. Photo by Liz Ham.
Ivey Wawn, In Perpetuity, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Performance Space. Photo by Mark Mailler.
Dean Walsh, Infinite Item, final development broadcast sharing from the Drill Hall, 2020. Photo by Heidrun Löhr.
Amy Flannery, First Nations Mini Bursary, March Dance residency, 2023. Photo by Tee Click.
“The Forgotten” by Lizzie Thomson, a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, part of “Vignettes flickers fades” project.
Nikki Sekar, Space Grant Agal Dance 2020. Image credit Agal Dance Company.
Audience gathering in front of the Drill Hall for the Experimental Choreographic Lab showing w/ Performance Space, 2024. Photo by Liz Ham.
Rebecca Jensen, Dolphin Caller, Experimental Choreographic Residency w/ Performance Space, 2021. Photo by Alex Davis.
BODY DATA LOOP, at U108, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2024. Photo by David CHEN, Hank TSAI, Anpis WANG. Project by Matt Cornell.
Sarah Kalule, Experimental Choreographic Lab showing w/ Performance Space, 2025. Photo by Liz Ham.
Wendy Yu, On The Cusp 2019. Facilitated by Karen Kerkhoven. Photo by Shawny House.
All the “Vignettes flickers fades” images by Ira Ferris.
Critical Dialogues is Critical Path’s publication that provides space for deeper thinking on choreographic practices. It is a platform for dance artists who work with text as a medium, or use written words to reflect on their practice. And a space for scholars to elaborate on dance from a theoretical perspective. Each issue is themed to reflect critical discourses of the time.
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