Responses to terra
Holmes à Court Gallery
Perth January 2024
Subterranean Knowledge
Gregory Pryor
I took my place in a seat that formed one link in a circular chain of fifty-five chairs. A 3 x 1.8 metre rectangular sheet of slightly crumpled and creased brown paper lay on the concrete floor, with a solitary supine figure nearby. I immediately think of sacred geometry: a circle enclosing a square and a figure. Sacred geometry in a cavernous industrial factory that is now the Holmes à Court Gallery in Perth, Western Australia. A single spotlight outside the circle is the only source of light, which rakes across the space we are now all focused on.
Once the circle is fully occupied, we wait for the figure to move. Initial movements suggest a heavy gravitational force is in play, and there is no inclination towards verticality. Each movement inevitably returns to hard ground. As the figure gradually rolls and stretches towards the brown paper and closer to this viewer, it is clear that this is not a young person, but an older performer, with white hair, and the movements on the concrete floor carry an extra force. The demands of the low movement on a hard surface are undoubtedly assisted by a clear technical awareness forged from a long career of working with this body.
There is no sound beyond the ambient: the gallery is located in an inner city semi-industrial area near major arterial roads, so the auditory backdrop for this performance is provided on a Friday night by the expirations of a city relieved for having got to the end of another working week.
body country matter death
Paea Leach
terra is a work with a fine and detailed score, rigorously attending to how to stay-with the evolution of a body of work that moves between striations of poetics, somatics, politik, psychology. It is work of the unafraid woman dancer artist, thus contributing to a world-body of (women) artists whose works work as resistance, because of the world and in response to it.
With vulnerability and a discerning mindfulness, terra creates space for us to understand it is necessary to see what-is: body as matter and ageing flesh. It makes collective witnessing of a lifetime lived as being-woman, being-bodily, a necessity. Implied in this gendered reality are the accumulated and insistent ruptures and utterances at the coalface of love and fury, and the need to uptake resistance because of oppression governed and maintained by patriarchal overlords. What occurs, then, is a sense that body-time and historical-time have been felt into and folded over in large swathes with careful thought and deliberate action. This gives rise to the sense that terra is indeed this woman’s, Alice’s, Opus. Filled with abundant life, and proximity even to death, it blooms and waits and offers.
Crack, fissure, bomb drop; a body beneath the world, beneath patriarchy, beneath colonisation, beneath art itself. But moving, always moving. The paper folds, she-woman breathes and rolls as one long thought, animal, exclamation, poem in a state of becoming and undoing and breath following.
When the performance of terra ends, we clap.
What moves through her, what moves her?
We have shared something rare, beautiful, and difficult. We clap. She bows. Fin.
A Walking Dance A Moving Lecture
Performance & Writing: Alice Cummins
Bus Projects Melbourne
May 2021
STRUCTURE & SCORE
PROPS: White bowl, warm water, sponge and hand towel
[I am sitting on my stool washing my feet in the white enamel bowl with a sponge so the sound of the water permeates the space as people arrive and settle.]
The foot is curved like a bridge we walk on a curved earth.
As we walk, the bridge of our foot takes us from a known past, with the reach of our heel,
through a fleeting present, as we pass over the tarsal and metatarsal bones of the arch,
to an indefinable future with the push of our toes.
Walking is a relational dance with the world.
Our footsteps leave a trace, a footfall, an impression.
Incision
CRITICAL PATH IMPROVISATION PRACTICES SYMPOSIUM SYDNEY 2014
Performance Writing: Alice Cummins
I am dancing. My body luminous with potential, libido, and jouissance.
Time is here breathing down my neck, the time of my life, the time of time itself.
I am a body without boundaries but with an organization that is apparent and made manifest through moving.
Pleasure diffuses through me.
I shift again. Leaning against the back wall, perched precariously against an invisible surface. The wall pretends to be there. I pretend to be there. It is all a charade. It’s the surface of things. It becomes a surface for showing. Who am I, what am I?
I move now, step at a time, skin on bone, raw with grief.
A wound, an incision...