-rupt is my most recent, ongoing choreographic research project. It is a culmination of many of my long-term physical interests such as balance, duration, repetition and intensity — all clearly rooted in ballet, but divorced entirely from theatricality — with a new formal investigation into plane-dimensionality and derivative* time scores; and an embrace of the fantasy, desperation and longing that so often accompanies the desire for dance.
*the derivative is a concept from differential calculus that attends to the relational patterns embedded within relations, often summarised as the ‘rate of change’. In this project I am drawing on my non-negligible, yet somewhat undisciplined training in mathematics to make conceptual connections between movement, dimensionality and meaning.
As my time is largely occupied by my PhD and teaching, -rupt carves a space for me outside of formal context and the demands to articulate, disseminate and justify. I engage in this project predominantly on my own terms, in private studio time, but I cherish opportunities to share and present.
-rupt I
ReadyMade Works, Moving Ideas residency, January 2024
ReadyMade Works, Moving Ideas showcase and sharing (co-presented with Emma Riches), June 2024
This version presented seven choreographic prompts of varying intensity, each reaching a crescendo of its own internal logic, before being cut by a change in a metronome-based sound cue. Sound design by Megan Alice Clune, with support by City of Sydney and CreateNSW via ReadyMade Works programs.
-rupt II
ReadyMadeWorks, 10th Anniversary 10 hour Dance Marathon, December 2024
This version was presented in two parts, with sound composed and edited by Nick Gunn.
Part I was an arrangement of mostly repetitive scores at a smooth and unchanging level of intensity, that decelerated to an unsustainably slow pace before an abrupt finish.
Part II orthogonally inverted the rotational direction most commonly associated with theatrical dancing, via the movement language of Pilates. Very slowly, I flipped my body from seated, to supine, overhead to prone, through a back arch to supine again, set to “Flute Solo - Nikiya” in Act I, Scene 1: 6 from the canonical ballet La Bayadere. A distortion in the sound, along with the slippage of my own physical limitations, gave the pinnacle of this physically exhausting task a transcendental quality. This intensity was then punctuated by a virtuosic ending of pirouettes.
Responding to the countdown/marathon format in which each artist had 12 minutes, these two parts comprised precisely 11-minutes, after which I held a one-minute plank to correspond with the countdown timer projected at the back of the dance space.