Works
January 2024
Image: Emma Fishwick
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
Image: Johannes Reinhart
May 2021
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
2019 – 2021
Alice with black mattress, Riddells Creek, May 2019
Choreography: Alice Cummins and Siobhan Murphy
Director: Siobhan Murphy
Editing: Dominic Redfern and Siobhan Murphy
Sound: Dominic Redfern and Siobhan Murphy
Alice with black mattress, Riddells Creek, May 2019 is a portrait of dancer Alice Cummins. Alice folds, sculpts, embraces and is at times engulfed by a black mattress that duets with her in a succession of shifting images, depicting a life lived in movement.
May – September 2020
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
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
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
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 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