This dossier presents artists who are of interest as I take my theatre-based practice into public space. My work is real-time performance, created through open and scored improvisations, weaving and layering dance with spoken word. My material is my dancing body, responding and crafting in the now the emerging moments of physical impulse, external stimulus, somatic imagery, and spontaneous text. Working with site responsive dance improvisation, my practice explores the critical frameworks of embodiment, feminism, expressionism, formalism, and mimetics.

My choices for this dossier are united through the themes of dance/movement, performance/the performative, improvisation, the body in motion and dance in public space. Artists were selected based on my felt response to their work. As William Kentridge says “there’s something you can feel viscerally…a much more bodily consciousness lets you know that you’re on the track of something…”

I wanted to review dancers Rainer, Brown, Stark-Smith, and Paxton through my new MA lens as they were formative to my Practice. These artists were part of post-modern dance scene and participants in Judson Church, and the performance art/site specific works which developed from The Happenings of the early and mid-sixties. Stark-Smith and Paxton have double value as the founders of Contact Improvisation, which most informs my movement vocabulary.

Engaging in the Art in Public Space program I reconnected with visual art, discovering Julie Rap, Kawita Vatanajyankur, and Erin Sweeney. I’m also delighted to be introduced to William Kentridge, whose compositions of drawing, theatre, dance, and film are a wonder! His performative drawing responses to projected images of the moving body are particularly inspiring.

I love the crafted pedestrian aestheticof Brussels dance! in urban space project, while local Jonathan Sinatra’s 1000 daily dances project has been very informative with consideration of site and filming (I collaborated in day 991). Andrew Morrish, leading practitioner in Melbourne’s improvisation community, is another source of learning as he presents (live or online) his Take Five or more project- 52 weeks of improvised performance.

Following selections relate to my upcoming 2023 residency exchange with Swedish artist/performer Lisa Larsdotter Petersson and musician Karin Johansson. Through their websites I stay connected to their artmaking and developments in their practice. Building my knowledge of contemporary Swedish art making is visual artist Nina Bondeson and performance artist Joakim Stampe.

My final addition is newly discovered Thomas Geiger whose performances in, and about public space, are both amusing and thought provoking.

Collating this dossier, I realise that my work is a collage of many influences and modes. Recalling Nancy Stark-Smith in a workshop years ago, words to the effect of you are every dance you’ve ever had, I see that my dance making is a multi-layered coalescing of the many movement practices, collaborations, and performances I’ve presented over the past thirty-plus years.