A Strange Place
Installation / Performance (2022)
A Strange Place describes the collaborative project between Singapore/Hong Kong-based dance artist and filmmaker Elysa Wendi and Australian choreographer and performer Rhiannon Newton. The project explores how conversations operate as choreography—as the movement and reiteration of ideas and stories that resonate through dialogue and creation. Drawing on personal mythology, the work decentralises authorship while engaging with the dissonance of connecting across the gaps between their embodied realities.
Our collaboration is grounded in the practice of conversation and takes an interest in how conversations operate as choreography, as the movement and reiteration of the ideas and stories that resonate between us. We understand conversation as a choreography that materially connects our different worlds, and which gradually constructs an embodied (strange) place that we inhabit together and can speak from.
We hope to share A Strange Place, a live sound installation-based journey through our choreographic practice in conversation. Our performance weaves together fragments from past conversations with live streamed responses. Voices multiply, synchronise and drift in a sound installation that reflects the strange possibilities for connection and dissonance enabled by working across distances. Our live performance sits within an installation of video and photography work that reveals the journeys, multiple experiments and many bodies that have inhabited our ongoing conversational practice.
A Strange Place is a collaborative project with Australian dancer and choreographer Rhiannon Newton that began in 2018 when we first met in Campbelltown during my residency and performance. Grounded in conversation, which we understood as a kind of choreography that materially connects our different worlds and which gradually constructs an embodied (strange) place that we can inhabit and speak from together, we made attempts to synchronise and share embodied experiences through encounters with various interfaces, from meeting face-to-face, to coordinating standing at the edges of bodies of water closest to us, and via internet cables that join Hong Kong to Sydney.
A Strange Place
Installation / Performance (2022)
A Strange Place describes the collaborative project between Singapore/Hong Kong-based dance artist and filmmaker Elysa Wendi and Australian choreographer and performer Rhiannon Newton. The project explores how conversations operate as choreography—as the movement and reiteration of ideas and stories that resonate through dialogue and creation. Drawing on personal mythology, the work decentralises authorship while engaging with the dissonance of connecting across the gaps between their embodied realities.