- Title:
- Dream Cellscapes and Alter Edith
- Author:
- Anador Walsh
- Date:
- 13.06.24
In a moment where the local Naarm (Melbourne) dance scene is being decimated by a lack of funding and we’re seeing organisations that support emerging and experimental dance close left, right and centre (see William McBride’s open letter on Temperance Hall’s potential closure), Performance Review is thrilled to be partnering with Dancehouse, one of the few remaining bastions of this scene. This year Performance Review and Dancehouse will co-commission and publish critical responses to the Dancehouse program, for the purpose of critically engaging with new works of contemporary dance and increasing dance literacy in Naarm-based arts writers.
In launching this partnership, I have written about two works of “conceptual dance” from Dancehouse’s first season of the year, Alice Weber’s Dream Cellscapes and Holly Durant’s Alter Edith, in order to frame this project.1 This piece sits alongside a review by curator, Isabella Hone-Saunders on Flesh Vessel by Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Yvonne Pham and Echo by Thomas Woodman and writer, Claire Summer’s response to Burn City Krump’s Pass The Buck #6 and Perhaps... who knows by Rosie Fayman and Jonathan Homsey. Future pieces in this series will be written by emerging arts writers looking to build their capacity in dance writing (if that’s you, please don’t hesitate to reach out, we’d love to hear from you).
Alice Weber, Dream Cellscapes, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Michaela Ottone.
Alice Weber, Dream Cellscapes
My girlhood calls to me often, especially now, as I verge on turning 30 and saying goodbye to it for good. So, entering Dancehouse’s Upstairs Studio to find three young, pyjama-clad women bathed in pink-hued lights, lounging about on the floor with their faces buried in laptops and smartphones, hit me someplace deep and familiar. As I walked to sit along the furthest wall (this performance was in the round), I scrawled in my notes “it’s giving Tumblr-core circa 2012.” Which, for anyone not familiar with that era of internet culture, was personified by self-coded blogs, sincere oversharing and for me at least, an excessive use of pink sparkly GIFS.
Alice Weber, Dream Cellscapes, 2024, Excel spreadsheet performance, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Screenshot: Anador Walsh.
Alice Weber’s Dream Cellscapes (2024) was a hybrid digital-IRL performance and the theatre adaptation of a project of the same name and concept, presented in 2021 in the gallery at Cement Fondu, Eora (Sydney). Although technically, the performance unfolded live in front of you, you were asked to spectate Dream Cellscapes in a way that was mediated through your smartphone, via the Google sheet app. This is because, despite the performers being spatially and temporally co-presence with the audience, this performance for the most part took place digitally, within the cells of a Google sheet.
In this sheet, the performers—Ella Watson-Heath, Molly McKenzie and Wendy Yu— inverted the established function of a spreadsheet (for work-based data accrual and management), rendering it a space in which to create, converse and perform. Over the course of an hour, the performers only slightly shifted positions IRL (between sitting and reclining or from one side of the room to another). But in the spreadsheet, they carved coloured pathways for the audience to follow; laying plain the work’s composition and the performer’s navigation of it in real-time.
Alice Weber, Dream Cellscapes, 2024, Excel spreadsheet performance, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Screenshot: Anador Walsh.
In this sheet, the performers—Watson-Heath, McKenzie and Yu— inverted the established function of a spreadsheet (for work-based data accrual and management), rendering it a space in which to create, converse and perform. Over the course of an hour, the performers only slightly shifted positions IRL (between sitting and reclining or from one side of the room to another). But in the spreadsheet, they carved coloured pathways for the audience to follow; laying plain the work’s composition and the performer’s navigation of it in real-time.
They inserted pictures, sourced from the internet or taken during the performance (selfies or clandestine shots of the audience); discussed dreams and the goings on in the room (who was present, how the performance was landing); created fake internet ads, like “head massage 15% off” and mocked the office culture they were actively subverting, by building a digital ‘co-working shrine.’
Intermittently, Watson-Heath, McKenzie and Yu prompted one another into briefly exiting this space (putting their devices down) to perform familiar movements away from their screens, like cat cows, toe stands and mermaid-esque poses to iconic pop songs by Fleetwood Mac and Taylor Swift. However, these dance breaks were always short lived.
Alice Weber, Dream Cellscapes, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Michaela Ottone.
Dream Cellscapes (albeit imperfectly) fits within an emergent category of performance practice I’ve been calling “the blue zone.” I characterise blue zone works as digital performance that is either activated by audience participation or predicated on the audience’s acceptance of this work’s recreation of liveness. It is performance that conceptually addresses life under techno or technoneofeudalism and lacks social media engagement.2 I say imperfectly because although the majority of the performance took place online, mediated by a digital platform and tool synonymous with contemporary work and data mining this work was presented live to an audience that was spatially and temporally copresent.
What is interesting about situating Dream Cellscapes within this blue zone, is what it says about the evolution of performance and spectatorship where it intersects with the digital. Dream Cellscapes’ employs the spreadsheet as means of giving structure to this performance and choreographing audience and performer behaviour within it. By funnelling engagement through an everyday-digitally hosted work tool, this work functionally blurs the lines between front and back-of-stage and public and private, creating an intimacy between performer and audience that is historically and technologically contingent. It overshares in a way that is consistent with both internet culture and, to come full circle, girlhood.
Holly Durant, Alter Edith, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Cat Black.
Holly Durant, Alter Edith
I took my in-laws with me to see Holly Durant’s Alter Edith on the afternoon of 16 March 2024. When we arrived at Dancehouse, we were offered ear plugs and speculated about how loud the performance would really be, as we bought mineral waters. This was all pretty run of the mill pre-show fare, but upon entering the Sylvia Staehli Theatre it became clear that Alter Edith was anything but.
Crossing the threshold, we found ourselves immersed in an alien landscape. Durant had done away with the stage and embankments of seats I’ve come to expect of this space and in its place had created a dark, damp environment, that blurred the lines between performance and viewing space and that felt at once organic and clinical, like a laboratory. The space was shrouded near entirely in black and punctuated only by fluorescent green staging elements and costuming and a few metal structures supporting equipment and props.
Holly Durant, Alter Edith, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Cat Black.
Alter Edith is a durational work running between two and five hours and hybridises installation with performance. Its season at Dancehouse was its second presentation, having debuted in 2021 at fortyfive downstairs, Naarm (Melbourne). Alter Edith unfolded over this period at a glacial pace and was performed by multiple performers including Durant (as Edith), Ayesha Harris-Westman (as stage manager), Jaala Jensen (as lighting technician) and Quell (as sound artist). Durant assumed the role of protagonist, while the others lurked in the dark, undulating in hammocks in Quell’s case and positioning and repositioning cameras to live stream the performance in Harris-Westman’s. You could access this livestream via a QR code on display in Dancehouse’s foyer.
Throughout the performance, a wet, neon green-haired Durant/Edith tried out and languished in banal human experience as if they were totally new to her. Beginning nude, she put on latex gloves like shoes, poured herself into a morph suit, examined then cautiously probed a bowl of water, dragged an ON microphone across surfaces creating jarring feedback and mixed herself a drink.
These experiments were soundtracked by a soundscape reminiscent of every sci-fi movie you’ve ever seen and mixed with the ambient sounds of falling rain and even dolphin noises. The moments between scene changes were marked by an overpoweringly loud, discordant sound that caused me to put my hands over my earbud-filled ears. This did nothing. The answer to my in-laws and my previous question was yes, this performance was very loud. The sound rendered me more uncomfortable than the awkwardness with which Durant performed her experiments.
Holly Durant, Alter Edith, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Cat Black.
Because of the duration of this performance (we were only able to stay for one and a half of the five hours), I am sure there are crucial parts that I missed. The below image attests to this and I also never got around to watching the livestream. From what I did experience, an easy parallel could be drawn between this work (especially given the timing of its first presentation) and humanity’s re-emergence into society “post”-Covid, where we all fumbled our ways through what was once everyday. However, the absurdity of Durant’s movements and actions made me think more about the ways we exist in and navigate the world and how we learn to do these things, they aren’t inherent.
Maybe I just have girlhood on the brain at the moment, but this in turn made me think about the violence with which gender constructs are inflicted on adolescent and pre-pubescent girls, and how they are treated as if they are aliens when they rebel against or refuse to adhere to these constructs. The cerebral rabbit warren this led me down, coupled with (in my experience) the absence of any overly virtuosic movement in this work, firmly situates Alter Edith within the canon of post-postmodern dance—with its intermedial bleed and heavy conceptual underpinning—that has become so popular here in Naarm in the last decade. In this scene, aliens are made very welcome.
Holly Durant, Alter Edith, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Cat Black.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of writing about dance. Amongst the many causes of the crisis presently facing dance in this city (which includes economic recession and risk aversion), dance’s ephemerality seems to me to be hindering its support. There seems to be some kind of psychological block—vis-à-vis how can you support what you cannot see and what does not endure—dissuading funding bodies from offering this medium the support it so desperately needs and deserves. It is my and Dancehouse’s hope, that through these writing commissions, we can provide this ephemeral and crucial medium with critical coverage and a mode of enduring documentation, whilst at the same time building dance literacy in a new generation of arts writers.
Dance theorist Bojana Cvejic defines “conceptual dance” as a critical, ideas-led approach to choreography, pioneered by a new generation of dancer/choreographers. Claire Bishop, “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention,” The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 28. Project Muse.
In Aesthetics of Coercion: On Neo-Feudalism in Contemporary Art, Andrey Shental situates technonefeudalism as capitalism’s successor, defining it by saying: “Amid sharpening inequality, expanding precarity, social demobilization, and rising monopolies, we witness the emergence of a new class of corporate digital overlords and an expansion of their propertyless servants, together known as techno-neofeudalism.” Andrey Shental, “Aesthetics of Coercion: On Neo-Feudalism in Contemporary Art”, Spike Art Magazine, accessed on 1 September 2023.
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Anador Walsh’s review of Dream Cellscapes by Alice Webberand Alter Edith by Holly Durant has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2024 seasons. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice.
Anador Walsh is a Naarm-based curator, writer and the founding director of Performance Review. Walsh’s curatorial and written outputs focus on performance art and dance, providing these mediums the critical and structural attention they deserve, as historically underrepresented visual art mediums.
Walsh’s research centres on the conflation of performance with the digital and the evolution of live art “post” pandemic.
In 2020, Walsh took part in the Gertrude Emerging Writers Program and was the 2019 recipient of the BLINDSIDE Emerging Curator Mentorship. She was an Associate Researcher of Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum and in 2023 produced Brooke Stamp’s PhD performance For the Record.
Walsh is the curator of Contact High, Gertrude and Performance Review’s annual performance program and in 2022 curated the Naarm premiere of Angela Goh’s ‘Body Loss’ at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. She has written for titles and organisations including Art Guide, Runway Journal, Memo Review, ACCA, PICA and the NGV.
Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.