Works

November 2024
Melbourne

Dance (Lens) Mini 2024 Dancehouse

Wednesday 27 November 2024
Dancehouse (map)

To launch Dance (Lens) Mini, join four screendance artists in Moving Portraits, a conversation and screening about dance, film, and portraiture, and the history and legacy of Australian women in dance.

Throughout the discussion, Moving Portraits will include screenings of Doing the Work (2024) by Siobhan Murphy, terra (installation 2024) a work by Cobie Orger with Alice Cummins. From 7pm, ON VIEW: ICONS by Sue Healey.

terra’s next iteration is a 3-channel video installation inspired by the live work by Cobie Orger and Alice. This immersive screen work weaves sound, sculpture and dance into a choreographed sequence of topographic and physical landscapes that express our relationship with, and concern for, country. 

Sylvia Staehli Theatre 6pm
Free Admission

Screen Concept & Direction: Cobie Orger
Original Concept & Performance: Alice Cummins
Director of Photography: Cobie Orger
Edit: Cobie Orger with Alice Cummins
Sound: Tilman Robinson
Lighting Technician: Peter Young
Production Support: Paea Leach
*Shot on location at Holmes à Court Gallery @ no.10, Gooyaman | West Perth

Original live work: terra - a 50min dance work informed by the knowledge of current and impending ecological loss. Erupting from an imagination placed under pressure for decades, terra invites us to feel what is happening to the earth, whilst creating something of awe and beauty. 
Program Notes

October-November 2024
Perth

Precursor: one piece at a time

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 Thu, 14 Nov 2024
Gallery Central North Metropolitan TAFE (map)

Gallery Central presents precursor: one piece at a time, a collaboration between Alice Cummins and Andrew Stumpfel.

precursor: one piece at a time explores how an artist works compositionally; the steps taken to create a body of work; from concepts formed and tested, to experimentation and curation of ideas and materials, and including in the journey the many relationships and networks formed along the way.

Alice will engage compositionally and choreographically with the residual objects Andrew leaves in the space. The presence of her body invites potentially new ways of perceiving and experiencing the objects and how they relate spatially and temporally to each other, the dancer and space itself. Dance realizes the temporal nature of form and matter revealing the capacity for being with.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

• Alice is present with objects: Mon 11 - 13 Nov, between 11am-12noon and 1-2pm.  

• Presentation/performance with Alice: Wed 13 Nov, between 1-2pm.

• Panel discussion with Soula Veyradier, Andrew Stumpfel, Alice Cummins and Andre Lipscombe, Thursday 14 Nov, 2-3.30pm. Moderated by Brendan Hibbert.

January 2024
Perth

terra
Holmes à Court Gallery @ no.10
10 Douglas Street
Gooyaman | West Perth
18 – 20 January 2024

Created & Performed by Alice Cummins
Direction by Nikki Heywood

terra - a 50min dance work informed by the knowledge of current and impending ecological loss. Erupting from an imagination placed under pressure for decades, terra invites us to feel what is happening to the earth, whilst creating something of awe and beauty. 
Program Notes

Writing & reflections on terra
Subterranean Knowledge by Gregory Pryor
body country matter death by Paea Leach

May 2021
Melbourne

A Walking Dance A Moving Lecture
Bus Projects

Performance & Writing by Alice Cummins

“… the rhythm of walking took the song into the body.
Through the body, song became dance, which in turn
became ceremony.” Margo Neale – Songlines, Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly.

The foot is curved like a bridge we walk on a curved earth.

Walking is a falling action - a delicate balance of weight, movement and
articulation between the bones, muscles and ground we are walking on.
Our footsteps leave a trace, a footfall, an impression.

Writing
Structure & Score

May – September 2020

PAUSE

The Home Project
Edit & Concept: Narelle Benjamin
Sound Design: Huey Benjamin

During Covid Nelly invited 22 dance artists to send her footage of themselves ‘dancing at home’ during the isolation and lockdown. The film was distributed through Dance Cinema - curated by Erin Brannigan.

July - September 2020
Riddells Creek Victoria

I Came Here to Dance: Notes on Survival
Directed and curated by Paea Leach

'Notes on survival' is a project with a short and brilliant life. A supernova. Reverent and irreverent. Part of it is made visible as online documents; catchments of words sent down virtual pages on a raw website. Here, the results of discreet conversations emergent from the body-minds of a handful of dancer artists; each and all deep in the question of what was (that), what is here now, what does my body remember, what would it, and we, rather forget?

2018-2020
Nepal

The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me

2018 – Directed by Cedric Cheung Lau
2020 – Sundance Film Festival

The Annapurna Mountains in Nepal set the stage for the quiet intersection of two travellers heading in different directions. Tukten, a young Nepali man, is on his way to Dubai for new opportunities when he meets Hannah, an older Australian woman trekking on her own. Their encounter ends up being the momentary interruption they both didn’t know they needed.

3 Mar - 3 June 2018
Adelaide

Biennial of Adelaide 2018
Evanescence

Directed by film maker Amos Gebhardt, choreography Melanie Lane.
Four environments, ten dancers in each environment. Forty individuals chosen to expand normative ideas of the body. The dance that unfolds on screen represents the becoming and decline of the human in and of the natural world.

19 Mar - 29 May 2016
Sydney
 

Sydney Biennale
In Memory of the Last Sunset
Collaboration: Neha Choksi and Alice Cummins

In direct engagement with Neha Choksi’s installation The Sun’s Rehearsal – a wall layered with multiple images of sunsets – dancer Alice Cummins’ cyclical performance asks urgent questions about the life of an ever-warming planet and the life of an ageing body. 

June and July 2016 – NYC and Montreal

Residency
In June Alice will be in NYC to work with colleagues and then on to Montreal where she is presenting at the annual BMCA conference, Metamorphosis: Evolutionary Pathways in Somatics.

Alice then has a residency at Concordia University, made possible through Erin Manning and the SenseLab. Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.

July 2016 – Perth
 

Dance/film Collaboration
After 15 years Alice is once more collaborating with visual artist Michele Theunissen. This new work involves several dancers, film and installation. As part of this project Alice will continue her collaboration with dance artist Jacqui Otago.

Based on the idea of disappearance. Of what? Of the world as we know it, of the natural world, of handwriting, of languages, of cultures, of youth, of forms of slow communication, of friendships, of loved ones.
Michele T - 2016

26 June 2015 – Melbourne

Footfall Ensemble
In the company of others
Dancers Naree Vachananda, Philipa Rothfield and Suze Smith, with musician Myfanwy Alderson, directed by Alice Cummins.

The Yoga Lab
494 Lygon St, Brunswick East

2014- 2017 - Perth

The Liminal Project
Improvisational practice/performance/research with Jacqui Otago

25 August - 5 September 2014; August - September 2017

Creative Residency – The Chapel Space
117 Angove St, North Perth, WA

May 17 2014 – Melbourne

Sound Body
Trio of sounders and movers

Conduit Arts Initiative
83 Brunswick St, Fitzroy VIC

May 13 2013 – Melbourne

MOV-E-MENT... response to a stimulus.
A performance of interactive fields, movement, sounds, installation.

Visual artist-curator Juana Beltran with Jenny Barnes (voice), Alice Cummins (dance), Scott McConnochie (saxaphone), Ren Walters (guitars).

“ Motion signifies a continuous change in the configuration of a physical system.”

La Mama Theatre
205 Faraday Street, Carlton VIC

September 14 2012 – Perth

Aperture
As director with feminist scholar and performer Brenda Downing.

“My body remembers everything, forgets nothing…it leaks memory into the silence…” Brenda Downing

The Chapel Space
17 Angove St, North Perth, WA

June 20 to 22 2012 – Melbourne

Where Our Edges Meet
ith collaborator musician/composer Anita Hustas,
Anniversary Season, – ALIVE! 20 Years

Dancehouse
150 Princes St, North Carlton VIC

May 21 2012 – Melbourne

Where Our Edges Meet
With collaborator musician/composer Anita Hustas,

La Mama Theatre
205 Faraday Street, Carlton VIC

2011 Melbourne

Where the Image Meets the Body, Symposium: (Next to) uselessness ... a performative tale, Monash University

The Little Con – gets square, Dancehouse

2011 Paris

Lumbar – with Sarita Beraha, Festival of Experimental Film

2011 Perth 

Aperture – director, 1st stage of creative development with feminist scholar and performer Brenda Downing