Frameworks, infrastructure and future planning are commonly discussed as essential elements for addressing society’s most urgent issues. In a culture that reveres ‘honest work’ and manual labour, where does creative labour fit?

Serena and Emma playfully use What Came Before choreographically and architecturally to be creatively economical and draw attention to the labour of change. As natural resources dwindle, workforces are patched over and creative industries continue to remain precarious, what might two semi-retired dancers and a builder offer to this conversation? Both strive to create infrastructure and frameworks throughout the performance and both work with what already exists.

What Came Before aims to combine the simplicity of construction and dance within the same space and time, prompting the audience to reflect on their views of meaningful work, impermanence, permanence and their relationship to feminised work.

Created: Emma Fishwick and Serena Chalker
Performed: Emma Fishwick, Serena Chalker and Michael Bullock
Lighting design: Peter Young
Sound design: Tristen Parr
Understudy & rehearsal assistant: Isabella Stone

Thanks to Jo Pollitt and Sam Fox for the previous and ongoing conversations with this work.

PICA and STRUT Dance present Restore – a triple bill of new and recent dance works from artists across the Asia-Pacific. Restore 2024 is a pilot program that spotlights restoration, connection and exchange in the region with an eye to sustainable creative choreographic practice. In 2024 Restore features a new commission from Boorloo (Perth) and West Australian premieres of existing works from Naarm (Melbourne) and Aotearoa (New Zealand). The three works express diverse perceptions of the world through different places, temporalities and roles.

WEST AUSTRALIAN PAPER - PRESS

DANCE AUSTRALIA REVIEW

All images & footage by Edify Media.

Digital Residency Perth – Seoul 2021

Over a few months in early 2021, Emma Fishwick & Serena Chalker (AU) worked in parallel to Gong-Won (KR) through Seoul Dance Centre (SDC) and their Digital Residency program.

Developing creative relationships during these uncertain times, this digital canvas captures process as product and is part of a broader program of international engagement through dialogue, documentation and artistic sharing. This website attempts to capture our artist-led peer-to-peer mentorship, cultural & skills exchange, facilitated by this virtual residency. Things that we have talked about: labour, process as the artwork, language across form and geographies, mapping of place and self, virtual Vs physical, place Vs placelessness and asking ‘what is a digital residency’? We have been finding connection between the seemingly disconnected threads in our works and in turn our worlds. We landed on ways of expressing space and time that is not linear or hierarchical through layering of memory, ideas, form and so on. The work is doing the work of figuring out what the work is. The labour of being an artist is made visible: always questioning, reformulating, reworking.

To view the online outcome click here.

All content on this page is created by Serena Chalker, Emma Fishwick, Gong-Won – 2021. Serena Chalker (www.serenachalker.com) | Gong-Won (https://www.hellosuyoung.com) | Emma Fishwick

SEED Residency 2020

What Came Before, is a movement and writing project that looks at the intersections of industry, specifically the arts and building sector. The work questions where labour exists within each of these fields, the slippages and contradictions of how that labour is valued as perceived by the individual doing the work, by the society it is in and the politics it is governed by.

Direction and Performance: Serena Chalker and Emma Fishwick

Mentorship: Jo Pollitt and Sam Fox

Thanks to STRUT Dance Org and HotHouse Company at All Saints College.