CARE DANCE
Ebony Muller
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'CARE DANCE' (2021), Ebony Muller. Photo by Cohen Medson (videographer).
CARE DANCE (2021) is a solo improvised screendance work that considers an experimental relationship to care and is shot in one take with a single camera. This work is a direct retaliation to widespread ideas in dance and art-making surrounding violence as power and currency that is indicative of artistic rigour in art-making environments. In CARE DANCE, the self is the primary source of all activities, as the performer follows their present changing state(s) to initiate movement, sound, touch and their relationship to the others in and of the space — embodying caring ideas such as listening, attentiveness, responsiveness and reflexivity in the present moment of improvising. Caring is the attitude through which they approach, interact, attend, respond, create space and engage. In CARE DANCE, the performer wears clothes in three alternating colours: red, yellow and green. These ‘traffic light’ colours denote different modes of attention and relationality as they move throughout the stages of the work.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ebony Muller.
Direction, choreography and performance: Ebony Muller
Videographer: Cohen Medson
Production assistant: Olivia Fisher
Supported by Deakin University School of Communication and Creative Arts. This project was filmed on location at Abbotsford Convent on the lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. CARE DANCE would like to acknowledge their sovereignty and pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
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Ebony Muller is a Melbourne-based artist and doctoral candidate at Deakin University. Ebony’s doctoral research centres on the field of feminist ethics, known as the ‘ethics of care’ and its application within artistic dance practice, specifically dance/movement improvisation and through the methodologies of practice-led research. Ebony is passionate about inclusive and caring dance practice, performance and education, and incorporates these themes into her work in various modalities. Her interest in care is perpetuated by her embodied and lived experience as sometimes ‘in-between’ spaces; her identity as a queer, South Asian diasporic and mixed-race person living with chronic physical and mental illness, which enacts implicitly, but forcefully, and politically, in her work. Ebony primarily creates, develops and facilitates embodied improvised encounters — whether with or for performers, participants or audience. Her work largely explores authentic behaviours and operations within these formats, utilising sound in particular, whether from the voice, body, or an external source, to induce the therapeutic, cathartic or ecstatic in her work.