Now Pieces #2
Paea Leach
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Now Pieces is a monthly platform for improvised performance that builds on the lineage of Cecil St Studio, a dance studio in Melbourne for 21 years that is now earmarked for demolition, to build apartments. Now Pieces continues a long standing disciplined exploration of embodied performance practice that leads to crafted, spontaneous and artful communication made on-the-go. This program invites a range of intergenerational practitioners who — in one way or another — prioritise movement to incorporate body, sound, vocalisation, memory, image and energy, responding to each passing moment in relation to the space where they are dancing in relation to the audience. Now Pieces 2021 curates curators as well as performers, opening up improvisation as a relevant, urgent, poetic transdisciplinary practice that reflects back patterns and possibilities for freedom, and flight.
This Now Pieces is curated by Paea Leach.
This iteration of Now pieces brings together women who range in age from their twenties to their seventies. Women with a life-long commitment to the practice of dancing, despite conditions that make the doing of dancing neigh on impossible. Women alive in their bodily uptake.
Curator and Performer: Paea Leach
Collaborators/Artists: Jude Walton, Alice Cummins, Amber McCartney, Caroline Meaden
Creative Correspondent: Naree Vachananda
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Paea Leach is an Australian/Ngāti Kuri dance artist. She works in the realm of the kinaesthetic, vacillating between the languages of movement, poetry and science as she makes work, collaborates, considers the value of dance & the potential of movement as medicine.
Jude Walton is an independent dance artist whose practice is informed by improvisation, experimental methods of dance making, somatic practices, and the New York post-modern dance movement. She wrote and established the BA in Performance Studies at Victoria University where she taught as Senior Lecturer until 2012. Her current project Dance and Ecology is envisaged as a rhizomatic form that emerges in various time/space situations most recently at Theaterhaus Mitte Berlin.
Alice Cummins is a dance artist and somatic practitioner with a 40-year history of contemporary performance making. Alice’s practice and enquiry into the lived body has led to a body of work that is a distillation of the experienced feeling body engaging with the materiality of contemporary life. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally in theatres, art galleries, public spaces, and studios.
Amber McCartney is a freelance dancer based in Melbourne. Her current interests are creating and working with prosthetic objects and striving for transformation through experiential physicalities.
Caroline Meaden is a dancer, performer and choreographer. While dance is at the centre of her practice, she collaborates with many other artists to shape works that integrate language, writing, humour, acting, sound and film. She is one third of the company, Alice Will Caroline.
Jo White is an Australian dancer and teacher. Her current interest lies in the exploration of energetic relationships between self, other, nature and the planet, specifically how we interact, exchange information, reflect and heal collectively.
Creative Responder :
Naree Vachananda is a dancer-researcher based in Melbourne. Her area of research is the embodied temporality of the dancer — the lived experience of / in / through time.
