Slow Choreographies

Slow Choreographies 2021-2024

Slow Choreographies is a PhD Project that is part of a larger Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities*, providing a creative response to the data gathered through an audit of university website images and open-ended interviews with ECR’s. My role has been to position the research in line with histories of feminist art and methods, in this instance Suzanne Lacy’s, Three Weeks in May (1977) and more. 

PHASE ONE | HERE THERE AGAIN | JUNE 2022

Here, in this place, at this time, toward this place;

There, at that place, so far as, in that respect;

Again, in the opposite direction, back or toward a former place;

Slow  relational, accumulative, and lasting effects;

Choreographies      of the ephemeral and embodied encounters.

HERE THERE AGAIN is a mapping of everyday sexisms within Australian universities. The work invites you to pinpoint the banal and slippery encounters that you’ve had on campus, whether via emails, down hallways, across classrooms, or in front of doorways. 

How do you give form to something that is at times perceived to be absent? How do you locate a moment that has gone by too soon? By walking and talking with early career researchers (ECR) from Edith Cowan’s School of Science and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, the work began by unpacking spatial and temporal understandings of individual’s experiences of everyday sexisms. Mapped through a series of creative outputs (written vignettes, photography, rugs, and notated building plans) this interdisciplinary project is an attempt to give physical dimension to an otherwise fleeting phenomenon.

This phase of the research was presented as part of #FEAS Unfinished Buisness Exhibition at Spectrum Gallery (Edith Cowan University). These outputs mark a point in a longer research journey, it is ongoing, a slow moment amid gathering data. The words here, there, again are a rendering of sexisms reality, and a reality that stretches sideways as much as it stretches forward and backward. The work builds a catalogue of everyday sexisms through spatial citations, amplifying how gender inequalities stretch across time and space. It’s ongoing and the work of intervening is never finished. 

PHASE three | Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts | OCTOBER 2022

Eight weeks Studio Residency to continue exploring Slow Choreographies Phase 1 (see above) and expand on the data gathered.

Key elements were tufting, slime, qualitative survey data and digital reporting.

Creative Focus Groups were run during this time with working academics to assist in the analysis of the data gathered.

PHASE FOUR | CHOREOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT WITH LINK DANCE COMPANY

and Again was a choreographic response to the different phases of Slow Choreographies PhD, it worked with the 11 dancers to create a 40-minute contemporary dance work and continues to extend the research findings through the affective resonances experienced by the audience.

To read more about this work follow this link here