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 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.

Now Pieces in October is curated by Tony Yap.

This antediluvian body is an ark carrying all necessary information under its skin to survive. It weathers well. It moves through space according to laws of boundary and territory that escape us. The ark of a secret covenant remains sacred.

It is important that in this space the artists are not so much interpreting intentions and lines of narratives, but rather, tracing trajectories to make perceptible what they can do. Here in this spacio-tempo event, lines of ‘narratives’ emerge from overtones when the artists map or cartograph their nomadic passages. This is done as close as possible without biases of creative expressive language.

Curator: Tony Yap
Collaborators/Artists: Reuben Lewis, Adam Forbes, Kathleen Gonzalez, Lynne Santos, Helen Smith, Brendan O’Connor, Takashi Takiguchi & Tony Yap
Creative Correspondent: Domenico De Clario