On The Table is a weekly event for artistic exchange and collaboration run by Caitlin Dear and Rebecca Jensen. Dancers of any training background, as well as people curious about movement though new to dance, are welcome.

Each week’s session is hosted by a different artist or collective who are invited to put something ‘on the table’ for everyone to examine together. The program features artists working with different styles of dance, approaches to choreography, methods of bodily practice and relationships to movement. On The Table particularly aims to highlight artists who work with dance in combination with other fields (for example gaming, science, therapy and visual art). Anyone from these intersecting fields are encouraged to come along!

Monday 28 March, 6.30pm — Catherine Magill

How does writing arise from dancing? How can we write somatically or make words move?

Informed by decades of experience as an improvised performer using dance and spoken word, Catherine will lead us through a series of practical explorations into the relationships between dancing and writing. We will play with both moving and witnessing movement as the stimulus for writing practices, to see what might emerge.

Monday 4 April, 6.30pm — Joshinder Chaggar

As part of her PhD studies at Deakin University, Joshinder is currently developing a solo Dance Theatre piece exploring embodied interculturalism and the complexities of identity. The project pursues a mix of highlighting diversity, and the blurring of borders.
In this session, she will perform in-progress material from this project, followed by a group discussion about the affect the material has on an audience. Secondly, she would like to workshop ways of moving between moving/dancing and sharing oral stories.

Monday 11 April, 6.30pm — Kristen Cafari and Tenae Smith (CoExist Collective)

This session will be based around CoExist Collective’s work “​​In [The] Making”, a performance exploring the nature of artistic process. The show challenges its performers to create improvised movement on the spot, in front of a live audience. In doing so, they are governed by a ‘movement score’ which provides parameters, instructions and provocations.

In this session we will watch a short performance of the score and before learning how to play with it ourselves. CoExist Collective would like to hear your thoughts, questions, and ideas on how it might be recontextualised. They’re currently seeking to develop the score into an improvisation practice which enables artists to question, explore, and develop methods of creation.

Monday 18 April — Easter Break

Monday 25 April, 6.30pm — James Marples

Join composer and songwriter James for an exploration of intersection points between contemporary dance and music practice.

We will experiment with using voice in different ways, play with pen and paper to create written song-structure choreographic scores, and work in pairs to experiment with duets in song and dance. Questioning ‘how the voice moves in space’, ‘relations within song duets and dance duets’, ‘how the psyche manifests through movement/sound’ and ‘how song structures (verse/chorus) might be adapted to a choreographic score’.

About On The Table:

Sessions range from workshops and in-progress performance showings to open artistic explorations. Artists might share choreographic material, a practice, an idea, a framework, a question, a score, a reading or any manner of provocation. Everyone is invited to take part in the tasks at hand. Participation can be as little or as much as desired and you are free to come and just watch.

On The Table is free to attend and everyone is welcome whether you’re a professional dancer or you’ve never danced before. Please wear comfortable clothing that you can move in and bring a water bottle.

For any questions or to submit an idea, please contact [email protected]

Instagram: @on.the.table.melb

Read more >>