Now Pieces #2
curated by Jo Lloyd
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Jo Lloyd. Photo by Peter Rosetzky.
Now Pieces continues a long standing disciplined exploration of embodied performance practice that leads to crafted, spontaneous and artful communication made on-the-go. On four Tuesdays across the year, Now Pieces offers an improvisational performance evening at Dancehouse dedicated to low-fi public performances curated by and featuring local dance luminaries. With each iteration an invited curator or collective will host and program Now Pieces following the seasons.
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About Now Pieces #2:
For the July Now Pieces Jo Lloyd, Madeleine Bowman, Rebecca Jensen, Lana Sprajcer, Rachael Wisby and Thomas Woodman will enact a spontaneous choreography, deriving from absolutes and sustained over 45 minutes.
Jo invited these five wonderful dancers, with whom she has worked with prior, to investigate possibilities together in a performance context, by preparing for a dance involving procedural and fictional information.
The 45 minute dance will be sustained through the efficiency of the six dancers. There is the potential for this dance to simultaneously ask and eliminate the question; the attempt is the choreography and the choreography is the attempt to do what?
Curator: Jo Lloyd
Performers: Madeleine Bowman, Rebecca Jensen, Jo Lloyd, Lana Sprajcer, Rachael Wisby and Thomas Woodman
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Jo Lloyd is a dance artist based in Naarm, working with choreography as a social encounter, revealing behaviour over various durations and contexts. Her practice seeks to find a language that refuses the limits of history, form and aesthetic. A dance graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts, she has presented and performed her work in galleries, museums and theatres both nationally and internationally including Japan, New Zealand, at Arts House and commissions for NGV, The National 4, RISING Festival, Bundanon Museum of Art, NGA, KCA and ACCA. She choreographs the peculiarities and complexities of the mind, which manifests in unconventional ways through the body. She forms choreographies out of distorted communications, diverse physical languages and interactions between dancers and the viewer. Jo teaches regularly in Melbourne and currently works out of her studio at the Abbotsford Convent.
Madeleine Bowman is a contemporary dancer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She has performed and toured for Chunky Move in Yung Lung (Sydney Festival, Carriageworks; and The Substation) and Universal Estate (OHM Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse). She has also performed in works by Jo Lloyd (Collision for Tasdance at Junction Arts Festival; and FM Air). She trained at QL2 Dance in Ngunnawal/ Canberra before commencing at the Victorian College of the Arts where she graduated in 2020. Throughout her studies she was the recipient of the New Colombo Plan Grant which allowed her to develop a collaborative work with students in Beijing, China and the Choreographic Award in her graduating year.
Rebecca Jensen is a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Her work includes performance for theatres, galleries, unconventional spaces and video, focusing on the interdisciplinary potential of choreography. Rebecca has presented work in FRAME Biennale 2023, Kier Choreographic Award 2016/2022, Front Beach Back Beach 2022, CONTACT HIGH, Gertrude Glasshouse 2021, Blindside Gallery 2021, Dance Massive 2015/2017. Since 2013 she has co-directed Deep Soulful Sweats with Sarah Aiken. Performance history includes Jo Lloyd, Lucy Guerin, Shelley Lasica and Adam Linder. She is a 2015 DanceWEB scholar, Australia council Cité internationale des arts resident 2020 and was Resident Director of Lucy Guerin Inc 2023.
Lana Sprajcer was born in Zagreb, Croatia. Lana graduated with a BA in Contemporary Dance (2016) and a BA in Comparative Literature (2014). She finalised internship at the interdisciplinary platform Tilt in Amsterdam and completed additional courses: Political School for Artists (2017) and Feminist Theory and Practice (2016). She is a co-founder of a collective based in Zagreb with whom she continues to make and perform dance works and choreographic installations. Since moving to Narrm, Lana has been working and performing with artists Shelley Lasica, Rebecca Jensen, Alicia Frankovich, Lucy Guerin, Gabriella Imrichova and Jo Lloyd. She teaches Guided Dance Practice at LGI.
Rachael Wisby is a physical artist who lives and works in Naarm on the stolen lands of the Wurrundjeri people. Rachael graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. She has enjoyed learning from and dancing with artists including Lee Serle, Jo Lloyd, Phillip Adams, Geoffrey Watson, Jenny Kinder, Nana Biluš Abaffy, Walter Dunderville and Natalie Abbott. Rachael’s artistic practice articulates a desire for physical action that undermines the body-mind dichotomy. She makes performance-based, body-derived work that manifests as self-generating choreographic systems. She is most concerned with the fabricated, the fantasised and the fictitious body. Rachael is a student of the body and extends her inquiry with studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Thomas Woodman is a Naarm/Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer. He completed a BFA in Dance (2015) with Honours through the Visual Art school (2019) at the Victorian College of the Arts. As a performer Thomas has worked with a number of artists, including Russell Dumas and Jo Lloyd. His choreographic work is preoccupied with human and non-human encounters, the micro and macro, multiplicity, eschewing notions of originality (how original…), the influence of mass media, and the function of imagination in performance and beyond. Thomas has shared work in a range of contexts, most recently presenting Echo (2024) at Dancehouse and A dead-end in itself (2022) at Temperance Hall as part of a triple bill. He approaches choreography as an equally conceptual and material form, drawing from a pool of multidisciplinary interests.
