Critical Dialogues #15: TIME

Time

1

Issue

CRITICAL DIALOGUES 15 March 2024

ISSN 2206–9615

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 dialogues and critical conversations.

Critical Path respectfully acknowledges that we are situated on the unceded land of the Gadigal people. We pay our respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

Publication staff Ira Ferris

Editor

Zoe Baumgartner

Graphic Designer

Critical Path staff Agnès Michelet

Artistic Director

Ira Ferris

Producer

Neil Godfrey

Finance and Administration Manager

Jasmin Sheppard

First Nations Artist Curator

Cover photo: Laura (Amara) Osweiler in 'Falling into Weighted Time'.

Photo by Greg Osweiler, colourised by Laura Osweiler.

Contents

5

Editor's Letter

7

self_stone

Kay Armstrong

12

What if time is granular?: A temporal organisation of improvisational material through the concept of jo-ha-kyu

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

19

Long Sentences

Rhiannon Newton

22

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

el waddingham

31

Swallow a Moon

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

39

Conversation: What happens in the pause?

Ira Ferris w/ Geraldine Balcazar, Diane Busuttil, Michelle St Anne, Tra Mi Dinh, Amy Flannery

61

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

68

Review: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

75

Contributors' Biographies

Editor's Letter

by Ira Ferris

5 “Whenever someone looks at a watch, the next thing they do is rude.”1

I think of two different possibilities with time: clock-wired time of our modern societies, or felt-time of (and with) nature. The latter, being closer to the body and our sensing abilities, enables us to be awake to moment-to-moment needs, rather than stuck in hard-set plans and chiselled rules. More elastic and improvised, felt-time allows us to access non-habituated movements and develop new radical choreographies.

In this issue of Critical Dialogues we look at time from the perspective of the body. As dancers and choreographers, we work with time as our material, partner, and of course a deadline-looming oppressor. Closely attuned to the whistles and whispers of the body, we frequently feel time weighing on us. But at the same time, with our bodies we can slow down time – by decelerating our movements, deepening our breath, widening our gaze. Our body is in control of time, as much as controlled by it – the two being in an intricate, somewhat convoluted, dance.

Kay Armstrong reminds us that our bodies can not only feel time but see it.

Once blinded by the clock-time, she now lives without a watch and in close proximity to nature, developing an environmental relationship with time. Here, time takes on an entirely other dimension – one of a spiral rather than a line – and she is reminded of the insignificance of her corporeal-time relative to the geological scale of time that surrounds her.

Similarly, Rhiannon Newton senses the minuscule-ness of one’s individual time as she puts her body alongside the timescale of the Earth, intertwined with more-than-human realities. Dancing and uttering her spiralling lines, she notices that we have been sentenced to a very long sentence within which our lifetime is only but a minute, though not an insignificant one. The spiral, of course, always loops back onto itself.

In my reflection on Angela Goh’s 'Axe Arc Echo', I write about the dizzying sense of infinity, the boundless extension of time. Confronted with perpetual and repetitive existence, I encounter the decree of tightly structured cosmological laws that cancel the possibility for delay or flaw.

I am unearthed by this mathematical precision and epic regularity which leaves no space for pause.

Accidently, serendipitously, or as a matter of perfect timing, the theme of ‘pause’ reappears in several contributions in this issue. Nareeporn Vachananda writes about the embodiment of time within the practice of improvisation and refers to the pause as a gap or an interval within which a dancer takes a moment to attend to and make choices; potentially reroute and find new pathways. As she puts it, pause allows her to “archive the experience” and circumvent habits.

While consciousness of time – afforded by the pause – can generate greater idiosyncrasy, it can also make a dancer feel naked and vulnerable, as we discover in ‘Conversation: What happens in the pause?’ with

Editor's Letter

Ira Ferris

movement-artists Geraldine Balcazar, Diane Busuttil, Tra Mi Dinh, Amy Flannery, and Michelle St Anne. Rather than allowing us to get lost in time, flawlessly performing the learned choreography, pause is an alarm bell that awakens the senses and orients a dancer within the continuum of time. This level of awareness requires confidence, comfort, and trust.

Commonly considered as a moment of stopping, in artistic practice pause is an active process of listening, reflecting, and generating – an invisible yet essential period of making. As such, pause can easily slip back into the capitalist logic of resting for the sake of greater production, but the reality is that sometimes we simply cannot afford to pause. el waddingham reminds us that urgency with time is not necessarily a byproduct of capitalism, but a response to the pains and sufferings that an artist feels called to address. Frequent production is at times an expression of love and care, rather than an egocentric seeking of gratification. In el’s experience, the regular artistic outputs are an offspring of intergenerational trauma and the necessity to counteract it – a way of returning, remembering, re-telling, celebrating, inspiring, and preventing. Fast and furious, they do indeed run against the clock.

A similar sense of urgency exists in Natalie Quan Yau Tso’s contribution ‘Swallow a Moon’ where she attempts to preserve the memory of a dying city, Hong Kong. Aware of the fragility of time, she creates a number of sensorially-imbued instructional scores that will allow her, and any future performers, to enact the experience of time gone. A way of time-keeping but also of time-travel (rewinding the clock), these scores expose the ability to hold “sensations and rhythms” in our bodies and are a reminder that time is malleable and experiential, a relational phenomenon rather than an absolute fact.

Laura Osweiler’s lived experience with Narcolepsy – “a neurological sleep disorder in which boundaries between awake and sleep blur” – brings to consciousness the elasticity of time. As she develops new choreographic work with Narcolepsy-time as her material and collaborator, she addresses Crip Time and Crip Energies, attending to many different experiences of time and therefore many individual timeneeds. Supporting her REM sleep-prone body with a harness, she once again offers an image of a spiral, orbiting within the gravitational pull.

The closer to the ground she is, the slower the time. Here, on the floor, she encounters: “Time of rocks and mountains. Time unchanging from the perspective of her short life.”

Perhaps this is why the closer to the earth we are, the lesser our desire for speed and the arrogance of clock-time, which has for centuries failed to listen to the felt-time of nature, resulting in robotised stiffness and deadened sense for timing. Indeed, how we relate to time is intricately linked to how we relate to the environment – how deeply we listen, notice, and attend to. Much in our future will be defined by how we use time today – how quick or slow we choose to move.

1 A Naro Bushman of the Kalahari Desert, in Claire Dunn, Rewilding the Urban Soul, p86.

self_stone Photo Essay by Kay Armstrong

7

self_stone

Kay Armstrong

self_stone

Kay Armstrong

self_stone

Kay Armstrong

self_stone

Kay Armstrong

My dances disappear but are found again in marks on the page.

Ah ha! me: 1 time: 0 Before, time was measured by the clocks – places to be, deadlines to meet – quantifiable chunks of activity connected to outcomes and personal economy. Now, I experience time differently. I live on a large property, I grow my own food, I have no watch, no clocks, I sometimes don’t know what day it is. Bin night marks it as Monday. Thank god for bin night.

Time is a filigree tapestry of ever-evolving relationships that tug at my senses. I witness it passing in the unfurling of feathers in the baby birds in my care, the arrival each evening of the big red ants on the march for their evening meal, the eucalypts stretching their long shadows across the paddocks, and the dandelions – waking up to the sun and hiding each afternoon – a sea of yellow that comes and goes, a kind of slow magic trick that makes me wonder if they were ever really there to begin with.

The lapwing’s dawn cries to the kookaburra’s last laugh as the darkness encroaches, constant waves of information flooding my perception. I grow food and watch it navigate a temporal alchemy from seed to plate.

I begin to see time, like really SEE time. It manifests in light, in plants, in creatures. It is massive and inescapable, but it is not linear. It is serpentine.

I am dumped by a wave. It happens often as I live near the ocean. I let the thrust of water pummel me. It smacks, thrashes and punches at my body, you can’t fight it. I close my eyes and I feel insignificant against this mammoth energy. My legs are thrown about, spindly and I’m upside down and back to front all at once.

I battle a condition that robs me of sleep. I don’t sleep for solid six months. I age exponentially, my brain slows, my fatigued body gives way to previous structural weaknesses so that pain is a constant nagging companion and my new form is askew, ropey and compartmentalised. I don’t recognise myself.

Ah Ha! time: 1 me: 0

All images were inspired by/created and/or shot on Biripi Country 2023. The photo essay is composite of self-portraits, ink and sea water drawings, charcoal on paper sound drawings, close up of ocean rock formation, sky reflections on Diamond Beach.

What if time is granular?

12

A temporal organisation of improvisational material through the concept of jo-ha-kyuby Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

Sometime in Autumn 2014, in a black-box studio, I was practicing improvisation; moving continuously for what seems like more than half an hour. I felt pleased with myself for sustaining a sense of flow and continuity, however I realised that this kind of flow was drastically different from the temporality I had felt when practicing a repertoire from Japanese Noh Theatre a day or so earlier. The duration of half an hour was an estimation of clock time, but it is not the experience of time which I felt, or embodied, during my improvisation.

The temporality in the Noh repertoire is underpinned by the sequencing concept of jo-ha-kyū 序破急; a discrete modulation of beginningmiddle-end.1 Adopting it from ancient Gagaku music, Noh theorist and performer Zeami Motokiyo developed jo-ha-kyū in Noh in the 1400s.2 Jo-ha-kyū aligns with the understanding of time in pre-modern Japan where time was organised as “ranges” that came in sequence with boundaries or demarcations between them (Furuhashi 1998: 101).3 That is, while each time range was understood as discrete or distinct, there was also a development or maturation within the range until it ended. The demarcations signified “changes in time” (Furuhashi 1998: 101). Time was at once discrete and ongoing.

1 The literal translation of jo-ha-kyū is “beginning-break-fast”. While jo means ‘beginning’, in the composition of a play or the progression of a performance it could also mean an aural foundation of the play. While ha signifies the middle of the modulation, it is translated as a ‘break’ from the foundation laid in jo. Ha could also mean a deliberation of the material in all of its particularity and with greater details. Kyū, translated as ‘fast’, is about giving final impression, resolution and culmination. In my practice, the interpretation of jo-ha-kyū as ‘beginning-break-culmination’ enables a clarity of perceptual experience when embodied in small movement, or in vocalisation.

2 Zeami Motokiyo 世阿弥 元清 (c. 1363 – c. 1443) is one of the key figures in the development of Noh theatre. From 1400 – 1433, he wrote approximately 20 volumes of ‘performance notes’ or ‘treatises’ of Noh as secret texts for his family members. These treatises were translated in many languages after WWII. Over 50 Noh plays were attributed to Zeami, many of which are performed to this day.

3 An example of sequences in time ranges is the seasonal sequence of spring-summer-autumn-winter. Each season is considered a range. In Japanese culture, the beginning and ending of each season are clearly defined, and the transition between seasons are celebrated in festivals around the country.

What if time is granular?

Image 1: Smaller arcs of jo-ha-kyū, nested in a larger arc of jo-ha-kyū.

Image courtesy of the author.

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

What if time is granular?

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

Jo-ha-kyū can be understood as such a range. In the Noh treatise Fūshikaden (風姿花伝, 1400 - 1418), Zeami recognised that there is jo-hakyū in all perceivable phenomena (Zeami 2008: 39).4 However, jo-ha-kyū is not Zeami’s theory of time as such. Instead, he applied jo-ha-kyū as an apparatus for infusing liveliness in the process of performing. For Zeami, jo-ha-kyū is a “principle of symbolic animation” within a fundamental understanding that life itself “is process” (Ramirez-Christensen 2008: 61).

Thus, the embodiment of jo-ha-kyū prioritises processes to generate an outcome.

Even though jo-ha-kyū pertains to processual organisation, many Noh scholars understand that jo-ha-kyū is also a temporal organisation (Hare 2008: 7). Zeami, in fact, might have been delighted to find a fellow traveller with respect to temporal organisation in physicist Carlo Rovelli.

In The Order of Time (2018), Rovelli argues that time pertains to process, and that processes and events are discrete with beginnings and endings (Rovelli 2018: 96–97 and 87). Contrary to the Newtonian time which is considered as an absolute entity,5 Rovelli and his team proposed that time and space that we experience is constituted of “elementary grains” which are in physics called quanta (Rovelli 2018: 83).6 Quanta of time emerges from “incessant” interactions between adjacent quanta of space; that is, time emerges rather than is (Rovelli 2018: 124–27).7 From Rovelli’s idea of time, a proposition came up in my improvisation practice: What if jo-ha-kyū could be embodied as a ‘grain’, a discrete event or process of beginning-progression-end? Then jo-ha-kyū grains could be reconfigured as discrete processes which are relational to my attunement and indeterminate in the potential they offer to the act of improvising.

4 In Noh, jo-ha-kyū can be embodied in all levels of performance material – in a small shuffle of the feet, in each kata (standard movement), a section of a dance, the whole dance, the whole play, the series of the day’s plays, and so on.

5 Before Newton’s idea of absolute time, the understanding of time was dominated for many centuries by Aristotle’s idea that time is a measurement of change and motion. In the 17th Century, while adopting the idea of change/motion, Newton conceptualised time and space as phenomena independent of other physical variables such as temperature, geography, gravitational force, etc. He put forward the notion of time as an absolute entity which exists even if there is no change or motion. Newton argued that absolute time must be intellectually reasoned through calculation and observation. Objectively measured by a clock, absolute time was thought to be universal, flowing continuously without relation to anything.

Sociologist Barbara Adam suggests that the emergence of the mechanical clock, a device by which Newton’s time is measured, has deeply influenced the Western way of thinking.

6 In physics, quanta (the plural of ‘quantum’) are elementary grains at an extremely small scale called ‘Planck scale’ after German physicist Max Planck who discovered the energy of quanta. At the Planck scale, the minimum duration of time is 10-44 seconds: a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

7 The emergence of time at the fundamental level involves the characteristics of quantum mechanics: granularity, relationality, and indeterminacy.

According to Rovelli’s theory, time is granular because it is reconfigured at the fundamental level. It is relational because it emerges from interactions between adjacent quanta of space. It is indeterminate or probabilistic because quanta of time are subjected to fluctuations and probabilities, like all other fundamental particles in physics.

What if time is granular?

Image 2: The sketch representing the tonality of my body beginning in my right hand, connecting to my torso, left hand and foot.

Image courtesy of the author.

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

Image 3: A diagram representing ‘nodes’ – the origin of jo-ha-kyū grains which can be the same as or different from the previous ones.

Image courtesy of the author.

In practicing Noh repertoire, where the material is known and clearly notated, the articulation of jo-ha-kyū seems straightforward. But in improvisation, the material is unknown until it is performed. When embodying jo-ha-kyū in an improvisation, I explored jo as a beginning in thought or an attunement to a relationship, such as between my body and the studio walls around me. One of the strategies for attunement was to wait attentively for a thickening of kinaesthetic intensity, which I attributed to the intra-corporeal tension in my body. This was felt through my tonic muscles and fascial system. For example, as represented in Image 2, I found a tonality from my right hand, right side of the shoulder, through my torso and to my left leg and foot. I explored a grain of jo-hakyū along the connected parts of this tonality. This might not appear as a movement.

What if time is granular?

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

It became apparent that to make a movement grain of jo-ha-kyū is to end its trajectory. Zeami called this a “fulfilment” of jo-ha-kyū (Zeami 1984: 137).8 By emphasising the kyū of a movement grain, I retrospectively realise the fulfilment of each jo-ha-kyū once each arc is completed.

In other words, each jo-ha-kyū grain is “back-formed”, to borrow philosopher Brian Massumi’s term (Massumi 2002: 7). The fulfilment of jo-ha-kyū results in a gap of time, or ma 間, where potential for attunement can occur. As a demarcation between each jo-ha-kyū grain, ma offers a performer an interval, or intervals, for integrating past perceptual experience and speculating what comes next. Through this attunement, upcoming jo-ha-kyū grains can emerge either from the same origin or a different one. I call the origin of jo-ha-kyū a ‘node’ – a knotty formation from which potential jo-ha-kyū grains can be issued, as shown in Image 3. Thus, the fulfilment of jo-ha-kyū, which creates ma, disrupts my habitual flow and becomes consequential to the temporality felt by my improvising body.

Through the understanding that time pertains to process, the temporal organisation through jo-ha-kyū shifts my attention to embodied processes during improvisation. In improvisation, and in Noh, by attending to these embodied processes one modulation at a time, each movement can be infused with a richness of perceptual experience.

These generate what I call ‘embodied temporality’, which is activated through attuning to the granularity of movement processes as they are back-formed. This also enables me to archive the experience one grain at a time. The pauses, or ma, between jo-ha-kyū grains allow time for sensing the relationality, crisscrossing various perceptual experiences, and speculating potential jo-ha-kyū grains. Contrary to the Newtonian idea of absolute time, the granularity of time allows temporal organisation as emergent, where time is embodied as grains. Within this experience, time is simultaneously felt as discrete and ongoing, emergent and accumulative.

8 For the notion of ‘fulfilment’, Zeami used the words jōju 成就. In the English translations of Zeami’s treatises by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakasu (1984), jōju is translated as ‘fulfilment’, while Tom Hare (2008) uses ‘consummation’ instead.

Image 4: A series of images showing the fulfilment of each jo-ha-kyū grain in my improvisation from the connected tonality in Image 2. Screenshots courtesy of the author.

What if time is granular?

Bibliography

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda

Furuhashi, Nobuyoshi. 1998. ‘Time in Ancient Japan–How Change Was Recognised’, Senri Ethnological Studies, 45: 101–22.

Hare, Tom. 2008. ‘Introduction’, in Zeami’s Performance Notes, trans. by Tom Hare (New York NY: Columbia University Press).

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham NC: Duke University Press).

Ramirez-Christensen, Esperanza. 2008. Emptiness and Temporality: Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Poetics (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press).

Rovelli, Carlo. 2018. The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books).

Zeami, Motokiyo. 1984. On the Art of Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. by J Thomas Rimer and Masakazu Yamazaki (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press).

———. 2008. Zeami, Performance Notes, trans. by Tom Hare (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).

Long Sentences

by Rhiannon Newton

19 Long Sentences has evolved as a kind of choreographic practice that aims to describe what I sense as I dance. The form of a long sentence is a way of experimenting with the possibilities of language to account for the multiplicity of stimuli, sensations and interactions that loop through and intertwine my inner and outer environments as I move. I like how this practice emphasises a condition of connection with, rather than separation from, my surroundings. It also seems to invite previously unapparent bodies to speak more loudly, particularly those inhabiting very different timescales from my own.

The first long sentence evolved during a solo residency at Helsinki International Artist Program (HIAP) on Suomenlinna Island in Finland in 2019. It is published in This Container 0.8.1 and has been performed on numerous occasions (Baltic Circle Festival; HIAP Open Studio; Live Dreams, Performance Space; and SCOPE, Dance Nucleus). The first sentence is centred around the speeds at which the human body heals in relation to changes in its surroundings. It evolved through a careful process of structuring text from my daily practice of dancing and embodied writing.

The Second Sentence was generated during an artist residency at The Unconformity in Queenstown, Tasmania. The sense of a body, or the body of a sensing sentence, here expanded to the landscape. It attempts to make sense of, or at least contemplate the feelings and timescales involved with the ancient and devastated ecosystems I was encountering.

In a recent residency at The Rex Cramphorn studio, I developed this writing through conversations with artists Martin del Amo and Nikki Heywood using performative processes of utterance, repetition, turning, recording, and looping. The arrangement here is an attempt to return this embodied inhabitation of the second sentence to the page.

The development of Long Sentences has been supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, Helsinki International Artist Program, Baltic Circle Festival, Critical Path, The Unconformity, Bundanon Trust, QL2 Dance, and The Discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies at The University of Sydney.

1 https://rile.space/books/this-container-08

Long Sentences

Rhiannon Newton

Long Sentences

Rhiannon Newton

Queering Time: Headfirst into History by el waddingham

22

I was recently asked during a Q&A with a class of first-year Arts students at a university if the reason why my creative output is frequent and often deeply personal is that I have ‘something to prove’. This stood out to me amongst the little stream of questions I had expected to be asked that day, and I did not have an answer prepared in my head (as I so often do).

It struck me as confrontational, but I couldn’t quite discern why at that moment.

I’ve always felt young. Not just in the literal sense, because I am young, but in a cultural and spiritual sense too. My work revolves around the exploration of the divine and the feminine body, and I often use ancient religious or cultural texts as points of reference for choreographic exploration, so I like to believe I understand how small my scale of existence is. However, upon reflection on how time has influenced me past the boundary of my birth year, the communal history of LGBTQIA+ existence in Australia reared its sometimes ugly head. I cannot shake this feeling that, like a shark, if I stop I will sink. I’m here for a limited time, so I must strike while the iron is hot and I am a marketable, consumable young artist.

Image 1: Young el waddingham.

Photographed by Jennifer Colverson, 2018.

Image 2: el growing into their identity as a queer person.

Photographed by Karrine Kanaan, 2023.

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

“I feel as though my career must be a marathon up an almost endless mountain with small respites of commissions, professional roles, grants or executive positions, but will never really come to an end, or to a place in which I can rest.”

el waddingham

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

Unfortunately, this sense of overwork permeates our zeitgeist and tells us we can be ‘successful’ artists if we dedicate every waking moment to our practice. It’s not just artists who experience this byproduct of late-stage capitalism. One-third of the general Australian population says they often feel ‘rushed for time’ (ABS, 2020). An artist that I respect deeply brags about how she hadn’t worked less than 40 hours a week in thirty years.

I feel as though my career must be a marathon up an almost endless mountain with small respites of commissions, professional roles, grants or executive positions, but will never really come to an end, or to a place in which I can rest.

It is an expectation within my community that you will give up paid work to rehearse unpaid projects, spend hundreds of dollars for development programs, fund your travel around the country to find work, spend hours writing applications and then more hours ruminating over the rejection emails. While one could argue that this is all just a part of a normal career progression in this economic and artistic climate, the toll that the current industry is taking on artists of all backgrounds and stages of practice is immense.

I cannot pretend to have all the answers or solutions to the political horrors of our day and age. I can, however, offer my account of how I have begun to shape my perspective of time, both in my choreographic practice and personal life, to begin to remedy thought processes that have been ingrained into me by capitalism and my experience of queer intergenerational trauma. I will be focusing on the last 236 years of Australian history and largely on the Western understanding of queerness because that is what I have lived, and that is what I have the authority to speak on. Please continue to seek BIPOC and wider trans perspectives on any of the incredibly intersectional issues I touch on.

el waddingham

Image 3: el waddingham photographed by Karrine Kanaan, 2023.

Image 4: el waddingham photographed by Emma Hargraves, 2021.

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

el waddingham

I first felt drawn to interrogate how the history of my community has influenced my perspective on dance-making when I found myself in conversation with an older peer about his interactions with queer performance as a young artist. He proceeded to unfold a history in which cis-gendered gay men dominated the industry during the 1970s-80s, living somewhat covertly, in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell reality of existence.

He described these men as impressive, profoundly creative, sometimes terrifying, and often working in positions of power as directors and choreographers for major companies. Yes, this representation is stereotypical and limited in its representation of queerness in Australian history, but most of the time the only trait that allows the queer body to slip into the mainstream is maleness. Nearly every story about these great men ended in a quiet remark about how they had suffered from AIDS and succumbed to the illness. I wondered aloud to him what they could have accomplished if only given the same time as their heterosexual counterparts. Then, I had begun to discover how paramount time is to my work existing at all, because I lack it terribly.

I choreograph in stolen moments alone in a studio. I have 60-90 minutes in class to pick up a phrase and perform. I have 6 weeks (often less) of a rehearsal period to synthesise a head full of ideas, words and movements into a show. There is no work I have created, nor any other practitioner, that has not been shaped and warped by time in some form, and specifically the lack of it in Australia. This sense that I am running out of time is in part a thought process created by capitalism – that my worth as a human is measured against how much content I can output. But in addition to that, this conversation prodded me to reflect on whether time and my experience of it was informed by something other than my immediate environment. Something that has sunk deeper beneath my skin than the fear of AI stealing my art or COVID cancelling my shows.

This led me down the path of unpacking my inherited communal and personal trauma, as a remedy for the destructive work habits I have built over the development of my practice.

In Australia, the AIDS crisis, religious oppression and socially acceptable expressions of homophobia and transphobia inform many of our interactions with the mainstream, but in comparison with other cultures, ours leans toward the progressive side of the coin. However, hidden under a layer of Drag Race Down Under and corporate-endorsed pride marches is the truth that we, as a nation, have not touched the healing work that is preventing us from tangible progress. It is not just history that informs my behaviour. It is my present. LGBTQIA+ youth are between 1.6-3.9 times more likely to develop PTSD than our heterosexual peers (Harvard, 2012) and 90.2% of transgender and gender-diverse young people experience high levels of psychological distress (LGBTIQ Health Australia, 2021). While being queer is certainly less deadly than it used to be due to criminal and legal reform, we still endure lower life expectancies due to high rates of suicide and self-harm. A past full of pain and a present society that often does not tolerate difference, is the perfect storm for intergenerational trauma to dig its claws into our collective mindsets.

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

el waddingham

Comprehension of intergenerational trauma has brought a great deal of understanding as to why marginalised communities are still being impacted by historical oppression. It is the theory that singular or multiple experiences of trauma can be passed through generations through the negative patterns of behaviour that form coping mechanisms or cognitive damage caused by the trauma. Intergenerational trauma is most often passed through family DNA, but can also be inherited through community experiences of oppression or violence, on a physical and emotional level.

On a day-to-day scale, I don’t think about my queerness too often, and I am lucky to be able to say that. It forms one part of my rich identity, and I surround myself with people who accept me wholly, without questioning or discriminating against my sexuality and gender identity.

However, this is not to say that on a grander scale, my pride comes without consequence. I am no stranger to homophobia and transphobia.

I have my fair share of stories of verbal and physical violence (as every queer person does). I grew up in the political warzone that was the same-sex marriage debate. I’m from a Catholic family and grew up within that community, and still experience a fair amount of shame and guilt about my queerness because of the homophobic belief systems I was raised on. My immediate family is nothing but accepting and has always been for the most part, but whenever I stepped out of our little bubble, I was bombarded with the reality that is the history of anti-queerness in Australia.

These stories, people and events cannot be forgotten. They must be committed to our communal memory because history tells us so. Queer people and catalytic historical events have been erased from records, either during their lifetimes through persecution and oppression, or in revisions as the cis-gendered white-hand of those who write our histories removes traces of queer excellence, or moments of acceptance. This is the knowledge that all queer people are forced to gain for our protection, so that we might become the gatekeepers of history like our ancestors before us. It is a responsibility that weighs heavily.

Ultimately, this feeling of futurelessness is a combination of the current social and political climate and my community’s history. So many artists who would have been my elders died due to direct or indirect consequences of oppression. Most of the queer people I see around me are from my generation, and many of us struggle severely with mental illness brought about by our environment. This all seems bleak, but I am going to attempt to do something that queer people are excellent at: turning pain into beauty.

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

el waddingham

Image 5: el in the studio. Photographed by Jade Ellis, 2023.

“This feeling of futurelessness is a combination of the current social and political climate and my community’s history. So many artists who would have been my elders died due to direct or indirect consequences of oppression.”

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

el waddingham

Tracing back to the Q&A that initiated this train of thought, I gave some relatively vague answers about feeling like I had to rise above my situation in life. I rattled off a list of immovable traits in my character that family or moments in my past have formed. But since that day, I’ve sat with this question because I didn’t know the answer to it, and I’m still not entirely sure that I do. I believe that student was right: I work the way I do because I want to prove to those who told me otherwise that queer dance, and queer life, can be bountiful and joyful. That drive to prove was born from the world around me telling and showing me that I will probably die young and without love.

But it’s more than that.

To put my practice and work down to the infiltration of capitalism into the artist’s brain is to entirely discount something that is a far more bountiful spring from which to draw: love. Tabitha Mpamira-Kaguri, the director of the Edja Foundation which performs exceptional work aiding young girls who experience sexual and domestic violence says that ‘trauma not transformed is trauma transferred’ (TEDx, 2019). If I can’t learn to slow the unsustainable output that my trauma tells me I must toil unrelentingly at, I can’t teach others in my vicinities to do the same. If we don’t learn to safely utilise the lens of history that time so graciously gives us, we cannot heal from the national and communal traumas that queer folk have endured.

I’m transforming my trauma into art, so that ultimately my artistic successors can hold space for deep listening and creation that serves the self and the holistic well-being of a global or local community, rather than for personal gratification under capitalism. I want to dance my dances and tell my stories as much as I can in the hopes that some queer kid who was just like me; maybe living in a regional town, dealing with that sinking feeling that your life will be vastly different from those around you or that life isn’t worth pursuing at all; knows that there is something so beautiful waiting up ahead if you just hold on. Enjoy the ride too. You’ll learn a lot more that way.

Perhaps I do have something to prove. To the spectral shoulders I stand upon with grace and integrity of queer lives past, and to the future that I brace to hold – that a life lived authentically will always be painful, but through the pain you will find unimaginable joy. You just have to give it time.

Queering Time: Headfirst into History

References

el waddingham

TEDx Oakland. (3 December 2019). Trauma not Transformed is Trauma Transferred | Tabitha Mpamira-Kaguri. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4loBphYCXI&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

Datz, Todd. (9 June 2012). Higher risk of PTSD for gay, lesbian, bisexual, ‘mostly heterosexual’ youth. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/higher-risk-of-ptsd-for-gay-lesbian-bisexualmostly-heterosexual-youth/

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (29 June 2021). General Social Survey Summary Results. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/general-social-surveysummary-results-australia/latest-release

LGBTIQ+ Health Australia. (October 2021). Snapshot of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Statistics for LGBTIQ+ People. https://assets.nationbuilder.com/lgbtihealth/pages/549/attachments/ original/1648014801/24.10.21_Snapshot_of_MHSP_Statistics_for_LGBTIQ__People_-_Revised. pdf?1648014801

Swallow a Moon

by Natalie Quan Yau Tso

This is a series of performance scores based on some of the sensations and rhythms that I collected in Hong Kong. They are a way for me to archive a dying Hong Kong before it’s too late, and designed for me to visit the place that I know when it becomes impossible to return to in the future. When I perform them, I hope to arrive back to my country, and I welcome anyone who wishes to remain a Hong Konger, even as the city disappears, to try placing these instructions onto their bodies.

These scores are occasionally bilingual and completed with drawings when words fail. They map the ways my personal past and Hong Kong’s past collide within me, and how they will keep colliding in the future as I perform and re-perform these pieces.

I wrote about Hong Kong, but I did not stop thinking about Palestine and ‘Australia’, and different people being colonised at different stages. The colonisers’ tools are similar and familiar. May performing these help me decolonise my mind. From the river to the sea, always was always will be.

Drawings on pages 31 and 38 are by the author.

Credit: Natalie Quan Yau Tso, Ocean Beds I and II, pencil and pigment on paper, 2024.

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Swallow a Moon

history piece #1 似水流年 錢

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Top up your octopus (opal) card with $2024 Record the year every time you tap time flows like water money 似水 錢流年 Try to think of what happened that year, at that place you doot (tapped) Treat the cents like months We will reach 0000 and 2024 at the same time Repeat

Swallow a Moon

meditation piece #1

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Hold grandma’s hand (she’ll think she’s holding yours) Match your pace to her steps you think her arm is still but it is the slowest pendulum Ignore the swearing drivers swerving corners grandmother’s clock is the only rhythm Ignore the smoke of mui 蕃薯 mixed with trucks her grip on your grip only Ignore the bumped shoulders and bags flung Go even slower when her arm pulls Ignore your pulse quicken by causeway bay she’ll make this traffic light ignore the fake democracy ‘vote now’ posters only her rhythm ignore her gripping you across the road when you were 4 she will make this traffic light ignore the time when she was faster than everyone including you only her pace Hold grandma’s hand so your palms make a full moon together that rises and falls at the end of her arm Only her hand Only our moon Only her Only Our On ooo OoOo OooOOo OooOo oOoOo Oooo oOo OO Oo o。

。

Swallow a Moon

fly piece #1

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

On sites of police violence turn your arms into a flag

Let them be moved by the wind

Swallow a Moon

history piece #2

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Go to the central public library Take the lift to 3/F, non-fiction section Ignore the gigantic 「靜」(‘Quiet’) sign Roam between rows and rows of Chinese history and world history Align your hips to the two timid shelves of「香港歷史」(‘Hong Kong history’) Glaze your eyes across the simplified titles Don’t need to check CCTV or if anyone’s watching because everything has been… hand-picked Do a handstand and open your mouth so the disgust from the bottom of your stomach can fall out and flood this carpeted graveyard But don’t really Pretend you’re not interested in HK history in front of the security Accidentally remember this is what they teach kids now Open your mouth for 靜(quiet) to drown and soak these false narratives until both shelves are empty then fold flowers from the wet pages and lay them awkwardly almost with respect because I don’t know how to mourn

At least when books are burned ancestors receive the truths as offerings.

I think colonisers know they cannot face their elders when they become spirits so instead of burning books they write over them to confuse the living memory.

I must not be confused.

Shake these shelves until all their teeth have fallen out and their mouths are open, flooding 靜 Leave this graveyard Remember elsewhere

Swallow a Moon

Hong Kong Central Library, 2023.

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Swallow a Moon

meditation piece #2

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Hold your cardboard sign up Match your pace to everyone’s steps once a week you get to be heard there’s nowhere else to be fullstops in chinese are a perfect circle, like this 。 see them as a full moon Let the voices drum your heart Use your entire oceanic body Lick the inside of your mouth Savour the taste of singing that banned song it tastes like a mother tongue splashing your ocean to clear the way between heart and belly so you can speak before it’s too late Let the moon draw the tides from within you and end your sentences with a 。 because truth is heavy enough to hold and pull the moon around 。 Look up 。 Keep marching to move this moon like a mirror to let oppression see itself 。 Let sunlight evaporate your voice into a drop in our thousands in our millions Open our mouths for 光 to pass 。

光 (light, truth, glory)

Swallow a Moon

fly piece #2

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

Watch the birds Match your eyelids to their wings Blink as quickly as they flap, take off

CONVERSATION: What happens in the pause?

Ira Ferris w/ Geraldine Balcazar, Diane Busuttil, Michelle St Anne, Tra Mi Dinh, Amy Flannery

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This panel discussion was held on 5 March 2023 as part of March Dance and supported through Critical Path. Dance and movement-makers were invited to consider the value of rest, pause, and stillness in creative practice and within dance.

Image: Painting by Lena Kramarić, originally in colour.

Ira:

Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us. I wish to acknowledge that I am facilitating this conversation on the unceded land of the Eora nation, and I pay my respect to the elders past, present, and those yet to come. It is our Indigenous elders who are the holders of the greater wisdom about time, and the environmentally friendlier ways to pace our lives. I extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations people who are joining us on this panel and as audience.

“What happens in the pause?” is the title of today’s conversation. I began exploring the topic of pause a few years ago when I was writing a text for ADSR Zine about the anxiety that artists experience when their practice comes to a halt.1 The sense of panic that we feel when we find ourselves not producing anything. Through conversation with fellow dance-artist Lux Eterna I contemplated the potential fertility of these moments; the fact that it is actually here that much of our practice gets done. Because it is here that the space for new ideas opens. It is here that the ideas percolate, gestate and incubate. And it is here that old ways of doing fall

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apart or are reshaped, and we are able to come up with the unexpected new.

We need these pauses in order to create. And in fact, I don’t know how we can keep creating if we don’t take them. If we don’t step out of the studio or away from the computer and let our thoughts wander through vaster landscapes. And yet, there seems to be little opportunity or encouragement to pause in our fast-moving arts sector, where our sense of worth is equated with how much and how often we produce and present.

There is a lot to be said about pause, many practical and philosophical angles to approach this topic from, and within these two hours we can only touch on a fraction of those, leaving much more to be said and contemplated. But rather than generating further material for discussion on pause, we hope that this conversation will embolden you to take more pauses, and offer more opportunities for pause to others. Not as a luxury, but as something that is mentally and environmentally urgent.

Personally, I think of pause often and practice it too rarely, and when I do much changes. I get out of habits. I see alternatives and I build strength to resist the givens. And most importantly, I align myself with the natural world around me. It is nature, in fact, that is my greatest teacher and mentor of ‘pause’. I’m inspired to pause when I lean against the deeply rooted tree, when I contemplate the geological time of the rock, when I try to imagine the rhythm of the heart of a hibernating bear which is apparently one beat every 20 seconds.2 All in the natural world around me, operates through cyclical exchange of extending out and drawing in. Outward and inward. And yet it is us humans – not all, but many – who have forsaken the regenerative value of the slow, dark, hibernating space. The unproductive time.3 I would now like to invite our five speakers to introduce themselves. I have approached you because of your somewhat different relationship to pause. To some of you pause comes relatively easy; you seek it actively and embrace it with calm. And to others it is a learning curve; maybe a source of anxiety, perhaps even guilt. I look forward to hearing and learning from each of you today.

As a way of entering the topic, I will ask each of you to tell us how often you incorporate pause in your day-to-day life, and when you do pause, what are the physical sensations that you experience? Tra Mi, would you like to start …

Tra Mi:

Hi. Thank you for having me as part of this talk today. I’m coming to you from Wiradjuri land in Naarm and I’m one of the latter people that you’ve mentioned just then – having more of an anxiety about how to pause. It doesn’t really come naturally to me in the way that I run around, or run forward, with the work and making. And so, to answer your question about what I do daily to try and incorporate pause… It actually comes from an action rather than non-action. I find it best when I think about

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relaxing my jaw, dropping tension in the jaw. I need things physically; I need to feel things in a sensational way. That’s a gateway for me to feel a bit more grounded, to pause and breathe into a moment.

Ira: Michelle:

Ira: Amy:

Ira: Diane:

Michelle…

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Michelle St Anne. I’m a theatredance-music artist. I sit in those merging worlds. I’m probably terribly anxious about the pause, but I’m better at it since post-menopause. I realised that as a younger person my life was really about lurching. It was always about not missing an opportunity, because the opportunities for the kind of body that I represent or present to the world were very slim back in the late 80s and 90s; for someone that looked like me and didn’t want to do the work that was representative of my physical appearance.

So that caused a lot of anxiety for me as an artist. And as I’ve become older and recently lost my mother, my emotional state of being has shifted and I’ve realised that opportunities will always come and go, and sometimes we just have to sit down and, as I like to say, ‘shut the hell up’, to see what is actually presenting in front of us. So coming back to the question of pause… In order to pause, I find my feet and their connection to the world. Also the dropping of my diaphragm is the best way for me to feel comfortable in that sense of pause. Although, I don’t even know if it’s quite ‘pause’, but we’ll probably talk about the actual word and its definition to us later on.

Amy...

Hi, everyone. I’m coming from Gadigal Wangal country, but I’m a Wiradjuri woman from the central west of New South Wales. The way that I like to pause is similar to Tra Mi. It’s a physical action. I weave a lot, which is my form of pausing. I feel like it’s a bit of a meditation. You can get lost in just creating. And perhaps because I’ve learnt it when I was out on Country with the aunties – I was sitting down; I was really grounded – it’s a way of going back there and feeling that kind of connection. Being transported back there allows me to find that physical relaxation.

Thank you. Diane...

Hi, I’m Diane. I’m on Wangal land. I have to also say, being a very physical person, I would experience pause through the body. Sometimes through movement. I find repetition to be like a meditation. And when I think about nature, I think walking consistently in nature gives me a sense of pause, even though I’m in motion. And I can experience that at the beach or the forest or also in urban environments. I just feel that repetition does something mentally to make me feel more grounded. But I guess my go-to for the pause is, I stay in recovery poses. So whatever it is that

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“When I need to step away from a thinking process, I'll try and inhabit the internal space. Get a sense of where my organs are. Feel the volume of my organs dropping. I mentally feel the placement of organs in my anatomical structure and visualize them sinking and spreading towards the floor, towards gravity.”

– Diane Busuttil

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I’m doing or thinking about, when I need to escape that thought or step away from a thinking process, I’ll put myself in Viparita Karani, which is legs on the wall. Or put them over the head to get into the jaw and neck area. And I’ll try and inhabit the internal space. Get a sense of where my organs are. I like to feel the volume of my organs dropping. And so sometimes I work with this idea of sinking. Can I sink? Can I actively sink? Can I use my breath to sink? So I just mentally feel the placement of organs in my anatomical structure and visualize them sort of sinking and spreading towards the floor, towards gravity.

Ira:

Thank you. Gerrie...

Gerrie:

Hi, everyone. Thanks Ira for the invitation to talk on this place of pause.

I’m in Bundjalung Country, the land of the Minyungbal people, which is right up on the northern end of the New South Wales border. I am in my bedroom, which seems to be the place that I have a lot of zoom talks, because I can see the mountains from where I am. And the mountain is kind of the border, the imaginary border between Queensland and New South Wales. But a lot of the mountains is actually a volcanic crater, which brings me to being in this part of the country and what being up here has done for me and pausing. I migrated from Chile when I was eight with my family and lived in Sydney for a good 31 years. Definitely a different pace, which is why my partner and I chose to move up this way. But for me pausing started in projects in Sydney where I was working in durational practices which brought together my practices of meditation, breath. What those practices brought in for me was an expansiveness, listening, and a silent place from where I could work better creatively. So slowing down has been a massive part of what I do; what definitely brings me into a pause. And I can feel my body physically moving forward when I’m not in that space. When I get really heady and am processing a lot, there’s this kind of motion that starts to happen. It reminds me or tells me that I need to pull back. So, slowing down takes me into that space of listening and it’s almost as if listening then takes me into a space of silence, and there’s an expansiveness there. So that’s where I am with that pause.

Ira:

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences with pause. Now that we have unveiled how we pause, or attempt to pause, perhaps we could talk a bit further about the benefits of pause. Some of you have already said that for you, pause is a way to step back from overthinking. And I also feel that pause is a good way to step back from the habitual thinking, which is what makes it a fertile ground for creativity. Pause being that moment when we give ideas some time to slowly take shape, rather than rushing forward to the habitual way of doing things. And as I said at the beginning, I can’t really see how creativity can exist without those pauses. So, I want to ask each of you whether you find it necessary to pause in order to create or do you find it more generative to simply keep going? Michelle, I’ll start with you, because I find you to be someone who tends to simply keep going.

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Michelle:

Yeah. I guess I make my work in a state of flux and panic. And anxiety.

And I think that can be generative, if the environment is kind and caring.

Because I make my work over quite a few years, generally a three-year period, and because we’re not funded, I have to work in these little frenetic episodes where we might get a residency here and there. I would have had thought about the work for a while; then it’s just about thrashing out those ideas and seeing what sticks. And then there’s that moment between – after that development and before the next one. It’s almost like a suspension. To me, the way that I live in my pause is more of a suspension. It’s when things start to shift. It’s in these periods that I put the patterns into my life. Like I’ll get up, I’ll have my shower, and then under the shower my mind rests and that’s when a lot of my thinking comes out. Or I’ll get out and walk up the street and in walking up the street I’ll get obsessed with some idea or a thought or an image, and then I’ll work on that while sitting in a café, watching people come and go, the way they move around, the way they press their feet into the ground.

This can go on for months, which is why I see these patterns in the world.

And then I come up to the next stage of development and then it’s all on again and it’s frantic again. I don’t know any other way of working, and I’d like to but in a way I also think, well, that’s who I am as a maker. I kind of like that obsessive way of working. But if I’m working for somebody else, I’ll have a lot more pause because when I come home at night, I don’t have to generate marketing material, I don’t have to look up budgets and write risk reports and all of that. I can have a bit more pause when I’m working for other people because I don’t have to carry that responsibility.

And so, that’s the complexity that happens when being an Artistic Director of an organization as well as the maker.

Ira:

Before everyone joined, you and I had a little chat and you said: “if we are paid, we can take pauses.” Which is what you are now touching on, when you speak about the lack of funding. Would having more financial support enable you to slow down and take more pauses; perhaps even feel less of that responsibility to keep going?

Michelle:

Yeah, I guess I have a very strange relationship to that because for the last eight years, I had a very big job. I was a Deputy Director and Operations Manager of a research institute and my hours there were about 50 hours a week, minimum. But during that time, I was incredibly prolific. I was making seven works a year. And they all had those long gestation periods as well. And so now that I’m not doing that, and since the death of my mother where I stopped because all of a sudden I sort of fell off the cliff, I realised just how exhausted I am. So it’s only now that I sleep for very long hours. I’ve noticed my panic attacks have decreased significantly. But I think just generally, as an independent artist, you have to do so much more than just make the work. You have to do all the admin-time. And so, if we do get money, it means we don’t have to have that other day job on top of it. And all that adds to the way we make work.

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Ira:

Amy, would you like to say anything in relation to that?

Amy:

Yeah, I feel very similarly in terms of projects and funding. Sometimes you have to pause because your work isn’t funded and you don’t know when the next funding is coming. Whether that’s a pause, or… And yeah, the way that I create is, even before I’ve gotten into the studio, I research the topic or the theme of the work that I’m wanting to explore.

And I obsess and dive into it so heavily that it’s all that I can think of. I do that for a few weeks and then I just completely drop it. And in that time I just allow it to percolate. I dream on it. But not actively. It’s just a process that happens to me when I’m out doing my everyday life.

Because I have researched it so much, it’s on my mind subconsciously, before I then pick it back up when I get into the studio. I loved Michelle’s word “suspension”. Like it’s a suspended pause. I also agree and love that in between of being in the studio and not being in the studio, life informs the work. You grow so much in that time and everything informs what you do. You grow so much in that pause and I think that’s really important.

Ira:

Tra Mi, when you are in the studio, in the midst of developing the work, and you encounter the moment of stress but the deadline is there and you can’t really afford to pause, do you have enough courage to step away and take that breath in order to de-stress; use the pause as a strategy to actually speed things up, so you’re not drowning in this sense of fear, stress, anxiety about the deadline?

Tra Mi:

Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve been reading this book by Jenny Odell called How to Do Nothing and I’ve been thinking a lot about this pause as a fertile ground, or pause to keep going, or pause for production later on. It’s an interesting thing because it is helpful for the thing in the short term, for something that needs to be done. And I don’t often step away actually; I wish I did more. In the heat of the moment, if I’m feeling a bit stressed, I just keep running. I might have a lie down on the floor for a moment, but I don’t often step out of the room which maybe I should do more. But yeah, it’s more of a getting-too-caught-up-in-my-head. And so again, it comes back to the body – dropping my jaw or maybe just lying flat on the floor to feel my weight. That can sort of slow the thinking process down a little bit and allow somewhat of a pause in the monkey brain. And the reason why I brought up that book is just thinking about the productivity that can be bred from a good amount of pause, which I think is very valid, but I personally and artistically need to invest more time in pausing without the intention of creating more things.

Ira:

In your recent choreographic work, Upholding, you have been looking at the “show must go on” mentality, where we don’t really afford ourselves time to stop but rather keep going. What was your relationship to pause within that work? As far as I know, the work didn’t have moments of pause within it.

What happens in the pause?

“Slowing down takes me into that space of listening and it’s almost as if listening then takes me into a space of silence, and there’s an expansiveness there.”

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– Geraldine Balcazar

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Tra Mi:

No, not really. I actually just had a week of relooking at this work, coming back into the studio, and the major thing I said was, this work needs more stillness. Trying to find moments of pause in it. In making the work it was, you know, upholding – keeping the balls in the air. Keeping on going. And while making that work, there was a part of me that really just wanted to pause. I had a three-week holiday coming up. I haven’t paused and I haven’t had a holiday in a long time and all I could think about was going on holiday and actually pausing. So, I was like, come on keep going so that you can have a pause, keep going and get this work done about keeping on going so you can bloody rest. And I’ve just been to Bali for the last three weeks and it’s been amazing. And it’s interesting that in this work that needed to just keep the ball rolling, I finally now realise, after a bit of a pause, that it needs more pause within it. Hearing what has been said so far, I’m thinking about pause as a thing that is actually not stopping but is continuous, moving with us all the time. As time doesn’t really pause, we just sit in it. So it’s about creating a more sustained relationship with pause. What I’m trying to say is that for me personally, I’ll just have a quick pause here, I’ll just have a quick day-off here, or an afternoon off here, but what’s more important is creating a considered deeper relationship to the idea of pause; not just inserting it in episodic places. I’m quite an episodic person. The type of work I make is very this scene, this scene, this scene, and then it all ties together through a theme. But through the theme of pause, instead of joining it in episodes and bookending my busy periods with pausing, I’d like to find a way to bring pause in overall.

Ira:

I want to touch a bit further on this idea of incorporating pause into the work itself. I was contemplating it a couple of days ago when doing an improvised performance in a gallery where I found myself moving a lot, not trusting my right to pause. I didn’t have enough courage to pause because I assumed that the audience wants me to keep moving; they’re not really wanting something that is still. So I kind of mistrusted the audience’s own need for pause or slowing down. And the idea of courage and bravery came up, in that I wasn’t brave enough to pause and invite others to pause. Diane, I know that in your studio practice you do work with techniques that encourage pauses and you maybe incorporate that in the work as well – does it feel courageous to do that?

Diane:

Yes, I do think we have a fear of slowing down, or not moving. I did a solo in Berlin and I did this walking sequence, I think it took me seven minutes.

I didn’t start out timing it, I just started with what I wanted to share. I was very immersed into details and subtleties: How can I place this body part? Where is the transference of weight? How am I moving the air around me? All these thousands of questions, but in a really slow way.

As body practitioners, we all have the ability to question such subtleties within the movement. And it wasn’t until I presented it to my colleagues at a showing that I realised that I’m demanding their infinite attention because they’re not looking at me moving my body around in a big space, but I’m asking them to find some kind of detail. So I think, yeah, it does involve courage.

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Ira:

Speaking of slowing down, Michelle, your works usually start off really slowly…

Michelle:

Yes, almost painfully slow, so that you want to get up and slap me. It’s my way of tuning the audience into the work. I know as an audience member, I often come into a work after I’ve just done 50 million other things, and I need to ease into it. So I’m always early in the foyer before I see work, because I just need to slow down. I’ve got to feel the space.

And as soon as the doors open, I’ll go into the theatre, to enter this world, to give myself time to readjust in order to receive the work. So, that’s what I want to allow for my audience too.

Ira:

In one of your works, you incorporated a pause in the midst of the work.

There was a halt. And it almost served as a shock to the audience. Can you speak to that dramaturgical decision to incorporate pause within the work as a surprise of a sort?

Michelle:

Yeah, I think it’s because when seeing work, audiences constantly search for meaning. They want to know this is what this means, and this is what this means. Particularly in the dance form or contemporary theatre, where there might not be so much language, the brain is overworking to try and understand it. And what we’re trying to do is say, we need you to receive this through your senses and through your imagination. So when I put this point of pause into the work, where two women come down and they sit down and there’s absolute silence but there’s six musicians on stage and people are going, there’s musicians, there’s no sound, and there’s these women just looking at us, and that goes on for 3.5 minutes.

You can feel everyone getting quite agitated. And then these two women simply get up and go towards the back of the stage, and the musicians start playing a tune. And people are going, what does that mean? I love having live music in my work because to me that’s contemplation-time. It allows people to rest. Allows people to absorb, by stimulating a different sense. Theatre is such a visual form, so in these moments you get to use a different sense and relax. I’m trying to look at that swirling sensory environment to deliver that suspension.

Ira:

Tra Mi, as a performer, when you perform pause in the midst of a performance, what is the sensation of that? Do you find it agitating, is it a place of fear? I’m asking because one of the movement makers, Kate Sherman, once told me that she feels most naked and most vulnerable when she is still on stage. It made me think that we move in order to hide; it’s almost like creating a blur. And if we come to that stillness, we are really exposed.

Tra Mi:

Yeah, it ties back to what you were saying before about having the courage to be still or to show stillness, a slower scene or a slower moment. I haven’t had to pause for too long in a show but have had

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to have a sort of a suspended, slow-motion moment. I’m currently on a work where we’re learning a lot of the movement back from about 20 years ago, off camera, and it’s all in your head a lot. And to try and remember the moves, you create a story with all the moves to remember them. And I was just discussing with my colleague the other day, that I actually don’t find that too helpful when performing or dancing, because when I’m dancing I don’t like to think too much. I don’t really like to think about what are the movements that are coming up next. I prefer to trust my body, that through the practice of doing and rehearsing, it’s in me, without going in and thinking about what’s coming up next. And so with pause; I find it hard because it is giving you a moment to understand where you are, where your feet are in the ground, aware of the people watching you, aware of the performers around you. And if you get a little bit too aware of your environment, you can forget where you’re up to, or you can sort of lose a bit of a sense of timing within the work, especially if the timing within the work feels like a different time-logic to the outside world. So I do find stillness and slow motion in performance to be challenging, because it’s testing your attention, and your attention when you’re performing is already doubled to what you’re doing and being aware that you’re perceived. And this is heightened in slower movement.

Ira:

Gerrie:

Gerrie, you recently needed to pause for a while because you became a mother, and in some way this semi-enforced pause within your practice created a sense of panic in terms of, how do I keep creating my work?

How do I stay relevant within the creative world while pausing for this length of time? I wanted to talk to you a bit about the relation between pause and panic, which tend to come hand in hand.

Yes, becoming a mother has definitely forced me to work differently in my creative being. It has forced me to bring my life practices into my art practices. It was an immense acknowledgement that I don’t need to separate the two. What I’ve realised is that I can use my life in my art.

That’s taken a lot of pressure off. My son is now three and a half, and so in that time which was as well a time of Covid-isolation and lockdowns, there was this insane space of questioning who am I if I’m not making.

And at the same time there was this pull of my attention that was needed in having a child. So yeah, there was this constant whirlwind of thoughts.

The creativity and the life outside of the studio were all in one; it was all going around, and I was feeling the vortex pulling me up and down.

And in that space I kind of went, okay, there’s nothing I can force to happen right now. This enforced pause definitely keeps bringing me back. When things get really busy in my head and in my life – all of the demands of the day – I say to myself, I just have to be in this, whatever it is. It is an acknowledgement that I have no control of this situation now, as in changing it. So I’m just going to observe it and sit with it. I’m going to watch it. And in this place, I started asking myself how much of that pausing and resting would I be doing if I was in the studio, getting paid? How much of that stopping would I be doing in that paid time?

Motherhood has definitely forced me to make work differently and I guess I’m now in that place of questioning how can I create work where

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“I’ve been thinking a lot about this pause as a fertile ground, or pause to keep going, or pause for production later on; the productivity that can be bred from a good amount of pause, which I think is very valid, but I personally and artistically need to invest more time in pausing without the intention of creating more things.”

– Tra Mi Dinh

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I pay artists to come and rest; be in that place of reflection, observation, listening, pausing, stillness. So that’s my practice at the moment; creating a blueprint for these different working methodologies.

Ira:

Within that space, you are also not focused on the outcome. Your current fellowship with Critical Path is looking at Time and as part of it we are spending time together considering time, allowing space for rest, not being pressured to have an outcome after the year of fellowship.4 How often do we have that luxury to not feel the weight of the expectation to produce, whether that pressure is externalised because we are paid to make work or internalised because we feel that we need to stay in the game and we fear of stepping away and not putting anything up on Instagram for a year or two or ten, or even a week. Amy, you are about to start a residency at Critical Path working with the theme of ‘tree sap’.

Is there going to be slowness and pause within that work given that it’s inspired by nature?

Amy:

Yeah, absolutely. I think when I create work, it’s often similar to the work Michelle was talking about. It starts very slowly. And for this particular one, you know tree sap is really oozy and there’s layers and it’s a process and has a transformation over time, which is durational. And so, I can see this work being quite slow, taking the time that it needs. Yeah, I think there will be lots of moments of suspension and time-play.

Ira:

And how do you feel as a performer when you enact those moments of suspension and slowing down? Does it create a sense of anxiety and panic, so you want to keep moving as a way to feel less naked?

Amy:

Definitely. For me being somewhat still is quite a vulnerable moment. So I find it important to stay in what the intention is, what I’m performing about. To keep the energy on that and don’t go into my head. Kind of similar to what Tra Mi was saying; you become so aware in this moment, so you need to stay connected to what you’re trying to express and how you’re doing that through pausing. Because it’s a pause; it’s not a stop.

There’s always some type of micro dance that is happening. But yeah, it is very vulnerable, so it is important to stay in this trusting yourself kind of thing.

Ira:

That’s a nice word. Trusting yourself in it. Because trust is the thing that is missing when we keep rushing. Which in some tangential way brings me back to responsibility that Michelle was talking about, where we feel responsible to keep the ball rolling, answer all the emails. But there is also so much responsibility in creating space for everyone to pause, all the people that you work with. Saying, let’s just not rush this because the work needs us to slow down. In the fellowship with Gerrie that’s exactly what we are trying to do; create dramaturgical methodologies that incorporate those long moments of rest and responsiveness to the needs

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of the moment, with that trust that we are not wasting time by wasting time.

Gerrie:

Yes, and because it’s a regional fellowship with me being her on Bundjalung country and my collaborators Ira and Stella Chan in Sydney, we’ve only been meeting on zoom, and when we’re in that space, it feels really spacious. Like we’d have glitches with zoom where we are forced to stop and let zoom do what it needs to do. We take it as a call for pause. So we would have breaks every so often, stopping the conversation and then starting it again. Taking it as a cue, rather than getting frustrated. But I have to say that when I’m out of that space, there’s this constant conversation that’s going on in the background: Were we productive enough? Did we do enough? And I keep having to force myself to say: it’s enough. Because if I don’t remind myself that it is enough, I’m not doing the work that I’m asking of the fellowship, which is to decolonise time and find new ways of working within body-practices.

And so that’s been a really interesting space, acknowledging that all the work that we do as creatives is enough. Because we’re carrying it with us all the time. And this conscious pausing and stillness and reflection, is part of the work. Is the work.

Ira:

Yes, it’s really changing the way we think, releasing our minds from the Western capitalist conditioning that we are worth only if we have an outcome of some sort, an output. It made me think how systems seem to fear pause, and I wanted us to consider that idea. Diane, what do you think, why do systems, institutions, fear pause; try to avoid pause?

Diane:

Well, I guess if we think about time, systems are set up to run on a certain time. Our days run on a certain time. And so I guess there’s a fear that if something doesn’t happen, it will have a domino effect and the system will crumble. I guess systems relay upon multiple facets of things happening simultaneously. We have the perfect example of the train system in Sydney that often takes its own pause for various reasons and many people’s plans are changed as a result. And if you think of the physical pattern of people moving and being transported, that whole geographical plan of where they’re going and how to get there, changes.

So then the system has to create another pattern of another working order to achieve its end.

Ira:

You’re touching on something interesting here when you say that plans have to change. Because that’s what it’s all about. We have projected these plans into a faraway future, of how things should be. And if something interrupts that, if we pause, then that projection crumbles. But this is precisely where creativity can enter, where something new and out of habit, out of repetition can manifest. It is in these moments of disruption that we can notice that maybe the way that we have organised our lives and our timetables is not necessarily how it needs to be. And systems maybe don’t want us to question that because we are meant to obey the way things are.

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Diane:

Ira:

Yes. And then there’s what Gerrie offered… I’m not a parent, but I have just spent six years as a carer for my father and that was a pause that was thrust upon me. I mean, I chose that role obviously. And I needed to accept it had a lot of limitations in terms of my creative output, but then of course other doors opened and other avenues became apparent to me. That was a massive shift that the universe gifted me. I just needed to readjust my thinking.

And now that you are out of that process, out of that pause, has your practice shifted in any way from where it was before?

Diane:

Yes, the role I took with my father has infiltrated into my dance and I’ve found a way to bring them together. And so it was, I don’t want to say a blessing in disguise, I don’t know that it was in disguise, but everything that happens is a gift if your perception accepts it that way. So yeah, that changed my practice. I now focus on the care involved in bringing dance to people.

Ira:

What shape does this care take? At the very beginning Michelle said how she needs environment that is kind and caring. And I was wondering, what does that environment look like in practice?

Diane:

Well there’s my personal maintenance, mental health maintenance. It is the responsibility to honour repairing. Repairing is, you know, being with my body, resonating with how I’m feeling internally. And then on the outside, I work in aged-care every week, and I now work in four or five dementia units every week, and I’ve thought about care a lot. Recently when I had the residency with The Cad Factory, I spoke about care with several artists from very different disciplines. We talked a lot about how we can bring care to ourselves but also to the people we work with.

And holding space came up a lot. Listening. Trusting. These are all very intangible things, but they’re all elements we use as artists to create work. So in my practice, they’re the things I bring when I’m with people.

It’s a lot of listening. It’s a lot of holding space. And coming from being a professional dance performer which was very much about me, me, me; now the practice is about others. The practice is about how can I use this skill to develop creativity in other people. And that’s through trust and care. And vulnerability. So, vulnerability come up few times in this conversation. The vulnerability of being still, the vulnerability of not having such an active space on a social media platform. I think vulnerability is a beautiful, beautiful place. It’s so fertile and as performers if we’re not able to share our vulnerability, then we don’t really have anything to offer.

Ira:

Michelle, would you like to add anything to that?

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“To me the pause is this constantly shifting space between people’s practice and people’s vulnerability, and people’s care and people’s curiosity.”

– Michelle St Anne

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Michelle:

Oh gosh, it’s such a big question, isn’t it? I guess I was thinking about care on my floor. I’m really aware of the power dynamics that happen on my floor and I’m always trying to negotiate that space between those who walk onto the floor and go, yep I know what I’m doing and can take up a lot of space, and those a bit more timid. And so, it’s calling upon people who you haven’t heard from. But going back to Diane’s point about the vulnerability, that’s probably the hardest part of my floor because I’m not very prescriptive and so there’s a lot of anxiety from my performers. But I’m also really vulnerable and allow the people I’m working with to see my vulnerability, see me jump off the cliff with them.

Because that is also really important, if I am asking of my performers to be vulnerable. In my last work, the foul of the air, I had asked the whole group of double bass players to move and perform. And so, I said, okay, I’m going to play a cello, which I can’t play. Because I wanted to say, I’ll meet you halfway. And I think that garnered a lot of respect. Finding this meeting space. I know that we’ve sort of moved beyond the pause, but to me the pause is this constantly shifting space between people’s practice and people’s vulnerability, and people’s care and people’s curiosity.

And if you can get that space to be that melting pot, it brings about an environment where beauty can occur.

Ira:

I think you have just defined pause for us. And at the beginning you said that you would like us to define pause because maybe it’s a word that we readily use but it means something different to everyone. Tra Mi, what does pause mean to you? How would you define this word, or this sensation, or concept?

Tra Mi:

Ira: Tra Mi:

Yeah, I think Michelle put it quite beautifully. For me it’s a shifting thing, and currently for me pause is a time to breathe. Breathing in the moment.

It’s connected to an effort to be present and notice what’s really going on in your body, in the way that you’re inhabiting your body and inhabiting the environment around you. I see it as a coming home moment that allows me to… yeah, I don’t really want to use the word moving forward, but kind of allows me to keep going. Which again, sounds a bit too on the edge of productivity. Something that I have realised in life recently is that change is happening constantly, all around us every day in minute ways, and even though change doesn’t seem to directly sit next to pause, to me it sort of does. Maybe it’s on an opposite side of the spectrum, but they speak to each other, or mirror each other. I’ve been considering change and pause in a similar vein. What I’m trying to say is that with change, it’s happening all the time. And with pause, you can lock into pause at any time as well. It’s not a static thing. Pause is a dynamic thing that we can connect to.

So almost like pause being a state of mind?

Yeah. I’m discovering that pause is always there, it’s just about whether you’re connecting with it or not.

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Ira:

Amy, how would you define pause?

Amy:

What Tra Mi said actually really resonates with me. Pause as a state. The shift of priorities.

Ira:

That’s a beautiful way to put it. Gerrie, what would be your definition of pause?

Gerrie:

Ira:

Michelle:

Ira:

I’m thinking about: comfort. Being comfortable with what is. Silence. The space where we are lost for words. Being comfortable in that non-verbal space. And also, it’s awareness, an awareness of what is.

Nice. Thank you for those definitions. And given that you’re speaking about comforts, we had a question here on the chat: How do you each prepare your audiences and bring them with you when creating slower work? Which in some ways is a question of comfort; how do you make them comfortable with that slow work. Michelle, you often play on the edge of comfort and discomfort with the audience.

I like to make my audience uncomfortable. Probably making them feel comfortable first, and then ripping the rug out from them. You know, comfort comes from recognition. If they see something in the work that they understand, identify with, that might be the hook, and then you can have your turn at having a voice. I have to quote a white man unfortunately, but Picasso said, “if you can offer something that people identify with, then you’ve got them and then you can lead them where you want them to go.” And that’s always stuck in my head when I approach making work. What can I put in there that people identify with so that then I can play with that. And the older I get, I find it more of a conversation. When I was younger, it was all about what I wanted to say and what I wanted to do, and now that relationship has changed. I’m more reflective about what is the experience of my work, as opposed to this is what I want you to walk away with. I think audiences also have to be responsible for the way they receive the work, bring themselves to the work and have an opinion of the work and fight for that opinion to matter, as opposed to just absorbing the work.

I do want to tease out this question a bit more; how to prepare the audience for the slow work. I’ve had this experience a few years ago where I was at a premiere of a very slow gentle film, and it was programmed as the opening-night film of a festival. Very bad choice.

People came with the energy of party, beers in their hands. Fifteen minutes into the film, there were only 50 people left in a 500-seat auditorium. The space was not adjusted for receiving that piece.

So I guess the question is, if we create works that are slow and that incorporate pauses, how do we create the whole phenomenological

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experience for the audience to enter into this work, into this pace. How do we take them with us on that journey from the moment they enter the foyer, until they sit in the theatre. Is it about using different lighting, or sounds, or anything like that? Diane, have you ever been in that situation where you had to create a whole event around it in order for the work to be received?

Diane:

The thing that comes to mind is durational performances where there’s a mutual agreement between performers and the audience that you can leave at any time, that you can stay, maybe there are pillows around and you have a little nap. My experience of performance in Berlin is that they’d have concerts that were durational and the doors are kept open at the side so you can enter and leave at any point. They did a piece with 12 pianos in which it was totally okay if you had a nap or had a sleep. I think that in Australia there are rare opportunities to be invited as an audience to have a different way of perceiving performance. I remember touring in Indonesia quite a few years ago and we had a cultural mentor with us who said; just so you know, the audience won’t necessarily arrive at the beginning of the performance; they may unpack their lunch while they’re sitting there and pop crisps. And all this stuff actually did happen while we were performing, and it was fine. So yes, other countries are doing it and have done it for a long time and it’s normalised.

Ira:

Given that you are mentioning this sense of absolute freedom offered to the audience – unpacking the lunch and going in and out – I’m also thinking about somebody like Marina Abramović where it was quite the opposite. She asked the audience to turn off their mobiles, leave their watches at the entrance. If anything, she wanted to take us away from the sense of time so we can really stay with the work. Because the freedom to come and go as we wish, can also encourage a sense of restlessness. And her work is very slow, so it would be very easy to get bored and want to leave and escape. I think she really wants to trap us in the space. Gerrie, you were one of the people who worked with her on this performance when she was in Sydney. What was your experience?

Gerrie:

Yes, it’s really interesting. I got really inspired by the work in that people were taken from their day-to-day time, and really immersed in this non-time space. You would leave your phone and all of your objects in a locker before entering. A set of headphones were put over your ears, so there was even the sensory losing of sound of where you were. And then you would enter this immense space where you could go through a different number of activities. Of course, everything was in silence. The idea was that you were going to be present. My senses were so refined in being in that work for about a week or two, that when we left the work on the final night and went out to celebrate, it was actually so much to go back into that loudness and interaction that we just had to leave and go back into this quiet space. So I was really inspired by what my body had gone through in this space and decided to create a work where I wanted to immerse the audience; I wanted them to have this sensory experience.

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“It’s a pause; it’s not a stop. There’s always some type of micro dance that is happening. But yeah, it is very vulnerable, so it is important to stay in this trusting yourself kind of thing.”

– Amy Flannery

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But I can easily say that I consider it a fail, because I put it into a traditional theatre space. Black box. Tickets at the front. Walk in through the space, being ushered. The audience didn’t know what to do in relation to this space that I created. Nobody wanted to walk on the stage, which was the invitation I had created, because the performers were there. So it’s really interesting, this question of the location and the place where we put the work. Michelle, you mentioned how the experience starts before the audience even arrives. It starts by the location and where it is that we’re setting our work, having in mind the experience that we wish to provide for the audience.

Ira:

And the way we promote it as well, the little blurb that we use, it starts even there. I’m going to shift us a bit to another question that we have from the audience. This one is by Julie who proposes that rather than thinking about this binary idea of productive-unproductive, we could see pause as an integral or central part of creative process. That maybe comes back to our original thinking that as artists, as creatives, we in reality never really stop and start. The ideas percolate within us all the time, whether we want it or not. It’s the nature of what we do. Tra Mi, it makes me think of the work that you’ve made called And, Again which dealt with the concept of ‘beginnings’ and problematised the assumption that we come to the stop and then we start something new, and then we stop and then start something new again. When, in reality, there is no such thing as stopping and starting. The process continues at all times, especially in those in-between moments of pause. The bulk of the work actually happens within those moments because that’s where everything gets clarified in our hands. Then we go into the studio and seemingly begin the work there. But this is actually the end part of the process.

Tra Mi:

Yeah, in this work I was again thinking a lot about this constant change.

Moving bit by bit slowly. This cyclical thing where things don’t really start or end, but are constantly shifting, and it’s about your perception, where you’re locking your awareness. And a pause-moment in the mind is potentially a clarifying gift of perception; to be able to see things in a different way, move on or ruminate for a while. With beginnings or with ends, everything is blurring and everything is very interconnected.

I used to try and pause my artist life to leave that and enjoy my life as just a person, but so much of the doing work, so much of what happens in the physical end-product of the work that we share with people, is happening constantly. When we’re dreaming, as Amy said, or when we’re having a conversation at dinner with friends. For people who are artists, who don’t or maybe shouldn’t try and separate the artist and the self, there is all this thinking that’s happening all the time. So it’s an interesting thing that we must show some sort of product or have an outcome as a way to demonstrate that we have done that funded thinking. It would be nice to have a funded opportunity that is funding you for all those times that you were thinking while seemingly pausing.

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Ira:

Thank you Tra Mi. I’m now becoming conscious of time. Of course, you always have a limit, and I don’t want to rush us out of this. I’m going to end on one thing that I wanted to start with, I feel they are important words to share. They are by an Indigenous artist and educator who was 2021 Senior Australian of the Year; their name is Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann AM and they are a member of the Ngangiwumirr language group. In this writing they reflect on the concept, or a spiritual practice, called ‘dadirri’, which is a practice of deep listening and quiet stillness. They write: “Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth. When twilight comes, we prepare for the night. At dawn we rise with the sun. We watch the bush foods and wait for them to ripen before we gather them. We wait for the right time for our ceremonies and our meetings. The right people must be present and everything must be done in a proper way. Careful preparations must be made. And we don’t mind waiting because we want things to be done with care. We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. And there is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for. And we don’t worry. We are river people. We cannot hurry the river. We have to move with its current and understand its ways.”5

1 Ferris, Ira (with wisdom of Lux Eterna). “just. drop.into.that.” ADSR Zine 005, October 2019. http://tinyurl.com/4ex4ed9p 2 The Emerald Podcast, 'Snail Juice & Bear Fat & Werewolf Moons.' Minute 12:00-13:00. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/snailjuice-bear-fat-werewolf-moons-w-leahsong-of/ 3 Ibid. Paraphrasing the section, 1:14:00.

4 In 2023, Geraldine Balcazar, with Ira Ferris and Stella Chen, received the Critical Path Regional Fellowship for the project ‘Decolonising Time’. https://criticalpath.org.au/resources/reflectiondecolonising-time-geraldine-balcazar-withstella-chen-and-ira-ferris/ 5 The full text can be accessed here: https:// www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/dadirri/

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

by Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

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Performing, as a centre in time, is what I enjoy most about dance.

Forming presentness. Where past and future are out of frame. It’s these effervescent aspects of time in dance and performance that I deploy to manage chronic conditions. And in a mobius turn of space, it’s the framework for my new dance ‘Falling into Weighted Time’ where I share my story of Type 1 Narcolepsy, a neurological sleep disorder in which boundaries between awake and sleep blur.1 During Cataplexy, one of its symptoms, muscles enter the REM stage of sleep, where they slump into part of the paralysis spectrum while the mind is awake, aware.

Bang! A cataplexy is triggered. A break in time. A rupture. An earthquake ripping open the ground beneath.

Too late. I’ve already responded. I’m already interrupted.

A knee buckles. My body drops onto the bent knee. Momentum holds.

Bones and joints support. Eyes assess the space. My mind notes I’m in a safe space. Can I slowly straighten? No. Action turns into weight. Gravitational forces collapse inward. I slowly spin down to the floor. Curving inwards. Body parts sequentially reach the floor.

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

Spinning. The bungee harness holds me up in space. Running in an orbit, pulling my arms and legs into centre. Kinetic energy increases. Speeding up. Extending one limb, two limbs, all limbs, slowing the rotation.

Spinning on one toe, body at a deep angle.

Spinning on my hands, within an orbit rotation.

Eyes are open, alert. The world streaks by.

Focus on a frozen point. The eye of a hurricane is a mystical space to be.

The ferocity of pelting rain and howling wind have come and will come again. But for a moment, the world is calm. Quiet. Still.

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

Down on the floor. Into a singularity, a black hole. Passing the event horizon. Time slows down, gravity intensifies and boundaries of perception expand. A delicate negotiation between strength and surrender.

From the outside view, I’m held in time. From within, the outside world speeds by. I move further into Crip Time. Settling into the floor, my body melting, spreading, flattening. Losing my edges. Muscle fibres and molecules come apart. Space fills in.

Memory-recording and thoughts slow down. A sense of self slightly dissipates. Breathtaking stillness of geographical time cocoons.

Becoming rock, mountain.

During a spectrum of time, I reconstitute. Memory recorder comes back online. Language explores the experience. Thoughts quicken. Body edges activate. Hands, feet, arms, legs. They assist the heavy torso into movement. Stretch, twist, roll. Testing body integrity as feet, legs, torso, shoulders and head stack onto each other into standing. Strength.

Cataplexy time is unlike a time distortion preceding a migraine: Being hit from the front by a rushing wave of time pushing me back. As the water recedes, time reconfigures and whiplashes me back.

Cataplexy time doesn’t move like a stretched and released rubber band.

I don’t slow down and then speed up to catch up with others. A time differentiation now exists. Like one twin left on Earth while the other travels in space at the speed of light. When the space traveller returns to Earth’s time zone, the Earth twin has aged faster. They’ll never be the same age again.

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

Bang! A cataplexy is triggered. Another break in time. A knee buckles.

My body drops onto the bent knee. Momentum holds. Bones and joints support. Eyes assess the space. My mind notes I’m not in a safe space.

Can I slowly straighten? I have to.

Testing. Standing. Weeble wobble walk. Pelvis slightly forwards. Hips figure eight. Arms down. Body rocks side to side. Relaxing into the situation but unable to slide completely down.

I’m enjoying floating gently along the stream’s current. Buoyant. Bouncing off the sides. Feeling out of timespace sync with those on the shore.

The unpredictable aspect of my gait unnerves others. Not wanting to be noticed. Perceived as drunk, off, peculiar. Judged. Masking as best as I can. Using energy, I strive to bring the edges of the stream closer, closer, close in onto myself. Find a regular rhythm. Balance in posture – upright, forward, linear. I sustain speed to reach a destination. To sit, lean.

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

There is something I can’t reach, verbally, consciously. The bungee cord is on its own time. Using it to move through space, so gravity has lesser impact. Holding myself at the edge of the bungee’s range. Time feels different. Muscles pull inward to hold. Arms extend, stretch. I suspend in a delicate centre. A balance between pulling and being pulled. There is connection, a tether across time to that moment in an episode when muscles relax and time shifts.

The quicker I move, the faster time feels.

According to general relativity, when I’m in my dance harness and I fall towards the ground, I am literally falling into weighted time. The Earth’s gravitation bends spacetime, and the closer I am to the ground the slower time is. When I’m standing and dancing my feet are in different time relative to my head.

Releasing from the edge. Sliding back. Feet grip the floor to stabilise.

Leaning forward, heels lifting, rolling onto the other side of tippy toes. The rush, speeding face-first to the floor. A trust in the bungee for support and protection from hitting the floor. Repetition over long periods of time produces familiarity. Facing the floor here in dance-time, supports me in real-time. It doesn’t stop the initial reaction but shortens its duration and slides Crip Time into it.

From my Crip Time perspective, people are often faster than me. Like a video clip of a loan figure standing while others streak by leaving trails, traces. I’m dancing though time in my own rates.

Crip Time acknowledges that time is relative – my sense of time relative to other moving bodies; to earlier in the day or the year before; to one part of my body or another. More importantly, it indicates that people with disability face barriers if they do not live/work within their society’s valued concepts of time and productivity. I also use the term Crip Energy because it’s not always about time, but energy. I need ‘extra’ time and energy support. I need breaks during the day which disrupts the 9-5 schedule. My energy may be limited or depleted which requires me to slow down or stop for various lengths of time.

Falling into Weighted Time… and Then Some

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler

The transcendental aspect of elastic time is familiar. In a taqsim, the section of a belly dance-show in which a solo musician improvises, there is no continuous beat. Instead, music meanders. Slowing and speeding up gradually or abruptly. Emotive. Beautiful. Singular.

Narcolepsy brings time further into awareness. The ‘loss of’ time due to episodes of cataplexy or sleep attacks. During sleep paralysis, mind and body are in different flows of time. Muscles feel frozen while thoughts zoom around, acutely aware of being unable to move. Time slows down during the long periods of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS).

Dance gives me a language to be in these different states of Narcolepsy time. Words to describe the experience. A physical training for my body to be present. In a mobius turn, Narcolepsy produces material to construct a dance, a performance – a centre in time – to share with you.

All images featured on previous pages are of Laura (Amara) Osweiler in 'Falling into Weighted Time'. Images 1, 3, 4 were taken

by Imogen Yang. Images 2 and 5 are by Greg Osweiler. Images were colourised by Laura Osweiler.

1 Dance over here to learn more about Narcolepsy: https://amaradances.com/infoabout-narcolepsy/

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

by Ira Ferris

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There is something fervent in watching 'Axe Arc Echo'. The endlessness, the constancy, the no pauses in it. Her body moving, repeating, perpetuating before we have entered. The action unceasing after we are gone. The formidable sense of foreverness makes me weak in the knees.

The kind of weakness, almost nausea, that courses through the body like a seismic wave. I’m shaken, but not on an emotional sentimental level; my response is purely (intensely) physical. It is not the scale of the space that overwhelms me, but the eternal repetition of her movements within it, which in fact never appear engulfed by the space.

I am tired for her. Not so much with her, because she never displays signs of weariness. And perhaps this forbearance increases the transferal of drowsiness onto my own body.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

There is no sentimentality in her performance – anything that suggests or explicitly calls for feelings, or physical sensations, I am grappling with. Her movements are detached from emotion, story, pedagogy. They are quiet, unassuming (though impressive), patterned, angular, regular, precise. Executed as pure forms, they appear to me as coding.

There is something digital about them. Something robotic about her.

I’m thinking of metal and glaciers at once.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

Simple mathematical choreography with approximately six different sequences or phrases, never builds up or recedes. There are no crescendos. The movements never explode. Are never loud. Never presented. They convey stillness, if stillness could be thought of as a long horizontal line with no peaks or troughs.

Contained and sharp, frosty almost, they carry through evenly without rest or momentary restraint. Without stopping, ending, emptying. And yet, in this infinite reciting there is no sense of perseverance that implies struggle. This is not an act of endurance. It is more cosmic (and glacial) than that.

A sense of infinity that makes me dizzy, because from the outside (watching) I become aware that there is no break, no change in pace, no breath, no principle of pause in the Universe; just a steady rhythm of perpetual sameness.

And while I’m unearthed by this knowing, the body that is ultimately enacting the persistence – her body – never displays the slightest sign of fragility. It simply exists in this cosmic reality, this scale of time that has no end points on the axis; is limitless.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

If moments of nothingness, emptiness, pause do emerge; they are relational to my perspective. Illusionary.

I am positioned in the far-left corner of the auditorium, where my vision is suddenly cut-off by one of the columns dividing the space into grids.

Her body now gone, action paused.

But if I lean slightly to the side, where the column no longer obstructs my vision, I see the action still unfolding.

Nothing has paused, nor it will. It is only my perspective that creates an illusion of a halt. My own limitation to perceive the totality of reality. The way I situate myself in relation to it, and the choices I make – whether to lean or not. If I choose not to, I choose pause. The appearance of it. I wait for her to emerge ‘again’ in my field of vision, rather than shifting my field of vision in order to find her.

Pause is a matter of my own inaction.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

I am in a scale of time that exceeds my comprehension.

The cosmological. The geological.

Her body – a body – a minuscule particle within this astronomical realm.

[Not an atmosphere of pity, but one of matter-of-factness.] She does not float aimlessly or faintly within this vastness, but perfectly arranged.

Structured. Ordered. An existence that is flawlessly laid out. Inorganic almost.

The kind of organisation that makes me believe there is perfect harmony in the Universe. Although, the sentimentality of the word harmony feels unfit here, frail. I am thinking of something much sharper at its edges.

Scheduled, with no space for error that is afforded to the biological form.

Cosmic never spills into the chaotic. Clear lines, clear shapes, clear pathways; there is punctuality and direction in her being. Her movements gentle and soft (gliding), but never flimsy or undetermined. She holds space (and time) with precision and control. And is held by both in turn, so I no longer know who holds, or controls, whom.

And while it all does seem otherworldly to me, humanly impossible, I now wonder if I too operate in such constructed ways, without knowing.

Punctually. Regularly. And whether there is space for fluidity, flaw, failure, delay, in the logistic of this existence.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

The sound that gushes through the space takes me further into the planetary realm – a timescale much larger than my everyday discernment. Larger than what I can hold onto, with stability.

This enormous, somewhat thunderous soundscape carries the space. Is bigger than it. Like weather, mostly calm, occasionally it rages.

Alongside, unperturbed by the changes (even insentient to them), her body continues as it were. Same actions, same expression. It carries on.

I, on the other hand, feel the intensity of sound ripping through my intestines. I feel flooded by its tectonic tremor; drained by its seismic proportion. Which makes her expressionless constancy appear alien to me. And while I transfer the drainage further onto my own body, to carry her fatigue, I feel nauseated by not noticing any signs of responsiveness on her. I can’t even see her breathing; imagine her breathing.

I am losing a sense of time.

REVIEW: Angela Goh, 'Axe Arc Echo'

Ira Ferris

The sense of standing firmly on top of a stable surface, any kind of surface, and in between two walls.

Within this limitless sameness, this boundless extension of time, where there are no end points that would box me or cocoon me into the clarity of time, into a reality, I feel thoroughly destabilised. Feeble.

A friend later tells me that his 8-month-old felt it as a lullaby and slept throughout. Another friend calls it hypnotic and transporting. And I wonder if being sedated and being unearthed are one and the same.

Whether stability, ultimately, deflates. Whether one feels unstable when everything is stable and there are no pauses in time to lean on, like one would on a pillar in a space. But instead, we are in endless, perpetual existence. Submerged in epic regularity, repetition, constancy. As we maybe are.

'Axe Arc Echo' was devised and performed by Australian dancer/choreographer Angela Goh. Commissioned by Art Gallery of NSW, it was performed in The Tank in October 2023, supported with funds provided by The Keir Foundation.

Image Credit: Angela Goh 'Axe Arc Echo' 2023. Photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Felicity Jenkins.

Contributors' Biographies Kay Armstrong Biripi Country IG: @making_wilding

Dr Nareeporn Vachananda Naarm W: nareevachananda.com

Rhiannon Newton Gadigal Land W: rhiannonnewton.com

el waddingham Gadigal Land and Meanjin W: elwaddingham.com

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Kay is an award-winning choreographer/dance artist who now draws upon her 30+ years in dance as she ventures into the world of visual arts. Finding movement in whichever medium she is working with, Kay endeavors to create psychological spaces that are poetic and unravel questions about the world. She makes works in mixed media, digital art, moving image, and photography. In 2021 she moved from suburbia to live on a large rural property where she has a daily art practice that sees her roaming the paddocks, using the compelling and unbridled landscape of Biripi Country as her muse.

Nareeporn is a dance-artist and researcher whose practice draws from Noh Theatre, somatic practices, and movement improvisation while collaborating with artists/practitioners across diverse disciplines. Naree began studying Noh in 2009 with the late Master-actor Udaka Michishige of the Kongō Noh School, and in 2019 continuing with Michishigesensei’s sons, Udaka Tatsushige and Norishige. Her practice-led doctoral research at the University of Melbourne investigates the link between time and intersubjectivity in solo dance improvisation. The research incorporates her Noh and improvisation practice with phenomenology and quantum physics.

Rhiannon is an Australian dancer and choreographer who grew up on Dunghutti Land on the Mid-North Coast of NSW. Her creative work draws attention to the interconnection of the body and the morethan-human world. Working from Gadigal Land (Sydney), Rhiannon makes contributions to community and culture through choreography, performance, teaching, research and curation. Rhiannon’s recent projects include Earthbound (Volume, AGNSW); Explicit Contents (Sydney Festival; Dancehouse; INDance; QL2 Dance); A Strange Place (Dance Nucleus); The Gift of a Warning (New Breed); and We Make Each Other Up (Dancehouse). el is an emerging theatre artist who works at the intersection of violence and camp, antiquity and presence. An electrifying drag performer, writer, director and dancer, they work as a movement facilitator within NIDA Open and multiple schools specialising in Shakespeare, political theatre and movement arts. Their practice revolves around improvisational and durational works that place queer and youth community healing at the centre. Unapologetically political, their work is a slap in the face with a palm full of biodegradable glitter. They are the artistic director of theatrePUNK co.

Contributors' Biographies

Natalie Quan Yau Tso Cammeraygal, Wangal, and Gadigal Country W: nataliequanyautso.com

Dr Laura (Amara) Osweiler Cammeraygal Land W: amaradances.com

Ira Ferris Gadigal Land IG: @artemisprojects

Geraldine Haydee Balcazar Cabrera Bundjalung Country W: geraldinebalcazar.com

Natalie is a performance and visual artist whose practice investigates bodily boundaries as political boundaries to make sculptures, installations and performances. She performs acts such as cleansing, eating and peeling that activate bodily dispersions; then collects these bodily materials, including saliva, sweat, hair and skin, to form sculptures that reveal slippages between the material and the corporeal. She is invested in transparent, almost invisible, materials as a mask that both protects and erases her in the post-colonial contexts of Australia and Hong Kong. In 2023 she was a finalist for the NSW Emerging Artist Fellowship by Artspace and Create NSW. Laura is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and scholar from the USA now in Sydney, Cammeraygal. She’s performed and taught internationally as a Contemporary Middle Eastern dancer, Classic American belly dancer and MENAHT folk dancer. She was the Director of Ya Helewa! Dance Company (USA) and holds a PhD in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside. Her current works interweave dance with audio descriptions and communication technologies to support access. She is researching the relationship of dance and her lived experiences of chronic conditions to explore Crip Time and Crip Energy.

Ira is a Zagreb-born, Eora-based multimedia artist, dramaturg, writer, and somatic practitioner with foundation in contemporary dance and training in BodyWeather. Her projects consider environmental consequences of speed and non-stop production, and are focused on ripping-open the Western concept of time. She has made and collaborated on works that deal with fatigue, and advocate for rest and idleness as forms of resistance. She co-authored SPACE BODY HABIT and produces/hosts arts program ‘Sympoiesis’ on Eastside 89.7FM. Geraldine is a Chilean born Australian performance artist, choreographer and mother-artist living on Bundjalung Country. Her work is shifting from solo work since becoming a mother, into a social body of work.

Observing the internal shift of time, she asks: What could be if we radically placed closer attention and care towards slowing down? In 2023 she was Critical Path’s Regional Fellow collaborating on ‘Decolonising Time’ and creating new models of dramaturgical thinking that support gentler conditions of making work.

Contributors' Biographies

Diane Busuttil Wangal Land W: creativecaring.com.au

Tra Mi Dinh Naarm W: tramidinh.com

Amy Flannery Gadigal Wangal Country IG: @amyflannery_

Michelle St Anne Gadigal Land W: livingroomtheatre.org

Diane is a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and performance artist.

Since 2019, she has been the founder and lead facilitator of Creative Caring, a movement-based organization that offers dance programs for seniors (50+) that increase physical and mental health through inclusive social engagement and creative exploration. Her practice is steeped in somatic techniques that explore states of silence, listening, and the practice of care integrated into her creative movement sessions.

Tra Mi is a dance artist, performer, teacher, and choreographer based across Sydney and Melbourne. As a dancer she currently works with Stephanie Lake Company and Lucy Guerin Inc. In 2023 she was commissioned by Sydney Dance Company to choreograph a work for the New Breed season. In 2022, she was the recipient of the Keir Choreographic Award. Her choreographic works include: Holding (2021), The ___ (2022), And, again (2022), (UP)HOLDING (2023). In their distinct, yet interconnected ways, these works explore our experience of time and our relationship to: endings, beginnings, waiting, and moving forward.

Amy is a Wiradjuri woman from the Central West of NSW. She is a NAISDA Dance College graduate and emerging freelance artist, working across dance and composition. She has performed, choreographed, and composed for a number of companies and independent productions, including Lost All Sorts Collective, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Jannawi Dance Clan, Dance Makers Collective, and Wagana Aboriginal Dancers. She enjoys working across disciplines and collaborating with other artists. Her current research focus is tree sap, its uses and benefits, textures and physical qualities.

Michelle is the founder and Artistic Director of The Living Room Theatre, a company that defies disciplinary boundaries and audience expectations. A prolific maker of works that value the impact and logic of the non-linear and multi-sensory, she transforms environments to challenge systemic attitudes towards violence and trauma. Her works are told through the body and she collaborates with movement and sound artists, as well as scholars and in-the-world-experts. Through immersive experiences, she disrupts the obvious and shifts perceptions.

Critical Dialogues is Critical Path's biannual online 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.

Sign up to Critical Path e-news to stay informed about the coming issues: criticalpath.org.au Your donation to Critical Path supports the production of upcoming editions of Critical Dialogues: criticalpath.org.au/about/donate/