Title:
WHEN I AM NOT THERE (AGNSW), Shelley Lasica
Author:
Lizzie Thomson
Date:
29.09.23

Shelley Lasica’s performance-exhibition WHEN I AM NOT THERE has prompted me to wonder what it might mean to write about a dance performance without having seen it. My curiosity isn’t in reference to scholars who rely on documentation and artefacts to piece together the missing parts of a past work, but to an experiment in writing about a performance from the impossible position of having missed it. Can I engage with a work when I am not there to see it unfold, to feel its affective presence or perceive its logic? What might happen if our world were to make room for a new profession – that of a dada-dance critic who only reviews works that they don’t attend? I write this with a nod to dance critic Claudia La Rocco’s opinion that “language is a miraculous failure” that cannot ever hope to capture the complexity of lived experience.1 I also pose it as an imaginative strategy to align the practice of writing about dance more closely with the practice of performing dance, by keeping the writer (and consequently the reader) grappling with the unknowable as a kind of sensibility that pushes dance beyond being just an aesthetic pursuit. Lasica’s compelling performance-exhibition is crafted in such a way that it is as much about being missed as it is about being seen and the following text attempts to operate in response to its layers of visibility and illegibility.

Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, 22 May – 04 June 2023, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Land (Sydney). Dancers pictured left to right: Luke Fryer, Oliver Savariego and Lana Šprajcer. Photo: Felicity Jenkins © Art Gallery of New South Wales © Shelley Lasica.

Since most dance-as-performance is contingent upon live bodies and co-presence, the title of Lasica’s recent performance-exhibition – WHEN I AM NOT THERE ­– is provocative. When I first heard that Lasica was developing a dance exhibition of this title, I envisaged a ghostly vacant gallery space in lieu of her own dancing presence. I imagined traces of a dance that was no longer there… sound recordings, scuffs on the floor, residue of breath or sweat on a windowpane. I presumed it to be a commentary on the difficulties in presenting live performance for the extended temporal conditions of a museum. But when I finally get to experience the work in its second iteration at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) on Gadigal country (Sydney), I am happy to discover that I guessed wrongly. WHEN I AM NOT THERE not only meets the demands of presenting dance continuously throughout the two-week duration of its exhibition, but it does so with a sophisticated understanding of time and its relation to potentiality and agency. Lasica achieves this impressive feat in collaboration with a stellar ensemble of dancers including LJ Connolly-Hiatt, Luke Fryer, Timothy Harvey, Rebecca Jensen, Megan Payne, Oliver Savariego and Lana Šprajcer. For 98 hours stretched across 14 days, these performers, including Lasica, dance in and through two adjacent gallery spaces creating an ever-changing, endlessly generative exhibition. And with this insistent presence of dancers dancing, Lasica’s provocative title is thrown back onto the audience members who are inevitably not there for the entirety of the work.

Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, 22 May – 04 June 2023, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Land (Sydney). Dancers pictured left to right: Timothy Harvey, Rebecca Jensen, Shelley Lasica, Lana Šprajcer, Luke Fryer and Megan Payne. Photo: Felicity Jenkins © Art Gallery of New South Wales © Shelley Lasica.

I visit WHEN I AM NOT THERE three times during its lifespan of 22 May – 04 June 2023 at AGNSW. My time with the work mounts up to several hours, yet my experience of it is only ever fractional. What’s more, there are always several actions unfolding at once across the different gallery spaces, so even when I am here witnessing the work, I am not there… and yet still there is more to this quandary, since ‘being there’ with a dance performance involves so much more than seeing it. I am captivated by the ways that Lasica plays with visibility and legibility in this work. The dancing is highly visible, yet the choreographic logic is perpetually beyond my grasp. Inside the well-lit, stark white spaces of the gallery, the dancers perform with an open, uninhibited presence that is hard to miss. They are conspicuously dressed in bright, androgynous costumes with hints of whimsical, clown-like make up. With each visit I make, they have changed into new costumes in a gesture of transience that keeps moving in sync with the elusive choreography. The dancers appear to shift seamlessly between rehearsed, predetermined choreography and live, improvised choreography. I can never grasp the cues for when the dancers shift mode into the set, choreographed material and I am left experiencing these changes as magic. This fluid, magical structure seems key to supporting the dancers’ pleasure as creative agents in the work. Knowing that this performance-exhibition is both a new work and a survey of Lasica’s past forty years of choreographic practice, I watch the moments of choreographed unison wondering if they are parts of much earlier works once performed by different dancers. The absence of signposting or obvious demarcations between different choreographic content feels very bodily somehow, all is present in its complex embodiment shared across multiple dancers. The lifespan of WHEN I AM NOT THERE suddenly seems to stretch out, well beyond its official two-week performance-exhibition at the AGNSW, to encompass at least an extra forty years.

Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, 22 May – 04 June 2023, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Land (Sydney). Dancers pictured left to right: Luke Fryer, Megan Payne and Timothy Harvey. Photo: Felicity Jenkins © Art Gallery of New South Wales © Shelley Lasica.

Along with the work’s generative dancing is a handful of artworks, objects, texts, sounds and documentation of dance on small monitors, all of which have been carefully selected from Lasica’s archive.2 There is also a non-hierarchical roomsheet that depicts all the elements of WHEN I AM NOT THERE in terms of their spatial organisation. Typed in a tiny font and with miniature diagrams, this roomsheet echoes the choreography’s refusal to deliver easily decipherable information. Together, these archival materials linger in the exhibition with a quiet and tantalising presence. On certain occasions they come into close relation with the dancers. At one point, I turn around to see Luke Fryer dancing in a space at the threshold between the two gallery rooms and a passage leading to the escalators. It is one of those areas in a public building that doesn’t usually register in our consciousness; a mere passageway to somewhere else; a non-place.3 Less than a metre away from Fryer, a gallery attendant and a visitor are deep in conversation with an AGNSW map. They seem oblivious to Fryer’s presence, despite his own sensitive navigation of all that surrounds him. Beneath his hot-pink false eyelashes, Fryer’s eyes are drinking in the situation. His whole bodily demeanour radiates a quiet, grounded attentiveness. There is a soft vertical fall happening inside his body. It is perhaps in response to this gravitational pull that my own attention falls to Fryer’s feet. And there underneath a sneaker, I glimpse the round edge of a small golden disc. Only just visible, it glistens like some kind of comic, closeted bling. I recognise the golden foil and realise that Fryer has appropriated the small disc from a larger artwork installed around the corner of the gallery and is now freely misusing it as a smooth apparatus on which to spin with his right foot.4 His engagement with the object is beautifully matter-of-fact, unencumbered from theatrics, irony or symbolism, yet quietly subversive. The moment is fleeting. Soon the disc is back with its home inside the gallery and Fryer has moved on. But witnessing this tiny event is exciting. It feels like being complicit in a game of testing what gets noticed and what slips under the radar and disappears forever.

Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, 22 May – 04 June 2023, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Land (Sydney). Dancers pictured left to right: Shelley Lasica, Timothy Harvey, Megan Payne, Luke Fryer and Oliver Savariego. Photo: Felicity Jenkins © Art Gallery of New South Wales © Shelley Lasica.

There is a particular performance quality in this moment with Fryer that I recognise repeatedly within all the performers. On one hand, I see a performer engaged in sensitive, subtle communication with those who care to watch them and yet I also sense that I am witnessing a dancer occupied in deep play to entertain themself. This permission for the performer to enter their own choreographic world while being watched enables a kind of soft-spectatorship, which only emerges because the work is so clear about itself (in all its open ended and fragile ambiguity) that it has no need to push hard, demand audience attention or promote itself with a didactic text. It is a rare privilege to witness dancers performing with this soft tone and self-containment. It opens an intimate space for being-with the work that goes beyond simply seeing dancing, reading bodies, decoding an artwork, or “getting it”. I read over my notes scrawled in a book while watching WHEN I AM NOT THERE and hilariously, I have written, “I love dance”. I only admit this here because I feel this work is not only compelled by a love for dance, but by a maturity of practice that enables it to be explored earnestly in public. Knowing that Lasica has created a dance performance that goes on when we are not there is surprisingly reassuring. It unhinges the performers from the obligation to deliver a product in service of the gaze and re-centres the work in service of dance as an ongoing, exploratory practice that is deeply social yet so unorthodox in its sociality. These conditions free up the performers and audience from a perceived co-dependence with each other. Responsibility is focused back onto the practice of dancing and to the time, space, imagination and agency that dance needs to stay alive to all its complexities.

Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, 22 May – 04 June 2023, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Land (Sydney). Dancers pictured front to back: Timothy Harvey, Luke Fryer, LJ Connolly-Hiatt, Lana Šprajcer and Megan Payne. Photo: Felicity Jenkins © Art Gallery of New South Wales © Shelley Lasica.

WHEN I AM NOT THERE was co-commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Naarm (Melbourne), curated by Hannah Mathews and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), curated by Lisa Catt. It was presented at MUMA from 16 - 27 August 2022. In addition to the dancers credited above, Lasica worked with creatives including sound artist Francois Tétaz, consultants Lisa Radford and Colby Vexler, creative producer Zoe Theodore and commissioning curator Hannah Mathews.

WHEN I AM NOT THERE forms part of Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum (2021-2024), a research project hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and involving partner organisations the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney; the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne; Tate, UK and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Perth. WHEN I AM NOT THERE has been supported by the Australian Research Council and the Art Gallery of New South Wales support partner Atelier.

WHEN I AM NOT THERE will be presented at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) from 11 - 23 June 2024.

  1. Claudia La Rocco, ‘Certain Things’, Afternoon Editions (No. 4) Ed. Mette Edvardsen, (September, 2022), p.31.

  2. See Lasica’s website for details

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  3. The term ‘non-place’ was coined by anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to transient spaces that allow humans to be anonymous. See Marc Augé, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, translated by John Howe, (Verso: London, New York, 1995).

  4. The small golden disc belonged to an interactive artwork by artist Anne-Marie May, entitled Breathing (2015), originally created as part of Lasica’s work Solos for Other People (2015), presented at RMIT Design Hub; then the Basketball Gymnasium, Carlton Baths, as part of Dance Massive 2015 (both Melbourne), 2 parts: metallic foam foil.

Lizzie Thomson, born on Ngunnawal/Ngambri country, has been engaging in dance professionally for over two decades as a dancer, choreographer, educator and writer. Lizzie has collaborated and performed in Australia and internationally in works by numerous artists including Mette Edvardsen, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Jane McKernan, Marina Abramovic, Angela Goh, Diana Baker-Smith and Emma Fielden. She danced with Rosalind Crisp in Sydney, Paris and Berlin from 1998-2008 and recommenced working with Ros in 2021. Lizzie’s writing on dance and contemporary art has been published in books including Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a project by Mette Edvardsen (2019); In Perpetuity, a project by Ivey Wawn (2020); Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice (2018), as well as in several journals including Performance Review, exhibition catalogues and a poster including a short essay for Agatha Gothe-Snape’s public art work A Well Being (2023) at UNSW. She has guest edited journal issues on dance for Runway Australian Experimental Art (Issue #36 DANCE) and for Critical Path’s Critical Dialogues (Issue #9 DANCE/VISUAL/ART).

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.