Senses of Ten - Work 7
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.
Our voices
Conversation
A sharing that aligns in reciprocal stories
Conversation as a balancing act
A new space
A deep earthy smell of wood
The speed of driving in thoughts
Old friends meeting new friends
A harsh rain
That contains this space
An aggressive sea
Overflowing drain
An orienting and locating “I am here” to those that know and care
New restrictions
An escape from a hotspot
Warm ginger flavoured liquid
A satisfying stack of cork coasters
Insistent circular imprints
Rain on concrete
Orienting
To orient, alongside one another, face to face, flattened on screen, at the edges of an ocean, or Oceans.
Washerwomans beach, Tasman Sea, South Pacific Ocean, Coral Sea, Solomon Sea, Philippine Sea, South China Sea
Drying rain dampened jeans.
A turquoise tropic laptop outlook meets this greyed, white washed, and rain splattered view.
The sea here is angrier.
Yesterday I was unwell. Today you are not well.
We zoomed into a scale where there is more action than I could imagine. Algae that hover and flash like satellites in the night sky. Miniscule prawn-like critters that hop across the screen. I strain the logic of my imagination to perceive this density of action within a tiny part of a water drop. I gaze out at this sea and strain my imagination to sense how it might continue and join to where you are and where I am.
I pause to take my damp jeans from the dryer - so that we might continue.
For now there is pause in the rain too and I can see to the horizon where before it was a blur of White. I think of your images of smoke and ice - these sheer material screens that partially reveal bodies.
This morning I drove through the thickest fog. It hugged to ground, thick and whitish grey,
revealing only a few meters ahead. Other cars' hazard lights flashed silently and out of sync.
It was spectacularly beautiful. I was listening back to the story about your friend who wrote very long sentences, who you delayed responding too and then, despite responding two years late in short sentences and having a nice mutual feeling, you fell out with. I imagine long sentences performed in a kind of fog like this where meaning and the body of the voice are constantly on the edge of being distinguishable.
I like this blurriness that is dense moisture in the air. I wonder if it too has living critters in it.
Planktons that take journeys to the clouds and then find themselves rained into totally other rivers.
I feel as though our communication takes time to float across these distances. It is not easy to synchronise. Perhaps this is a practice in groundless synchronisation, in floating attempts at floating together.
I think you described it as the parts that are indivisible, and then you also said, merging and synchronising, merging and synchronising.
I like how we often describe things as strange.
Senses of Ten - Work 7
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.
Our voices
Conversation
A sharing that aligns in reciprocal stories
Conversation as a balancing act
A new space
A deep earthy smell of wood
The speed of driving in thoughts
Old friends meeting new friends
A harsh rain
That contains this space
An aggressive sea
Overflowing drain
An orienting and locating “I am here” to those that know and care
New restrictions
An escape from a hotspot
Warm ginger flavoured liquid
A satisfying stack of cork coasters
Insistent circular imprints
Rain on concrete
Orienting
To orient, alongside one another, face to face, flattened on screen, at the edges of an ocean, or Oceans.
Washerwomans beach, Tasman Sea, South Pacific Ocean, Coral Sea, Solomon Sea, Philippine Sea, South China Sea
Drying rain dampened jeans.
A turquoise tropic laptop outlook meets this greyed, white washed, and rain splattered view.
The sea here is angrier.
Yesterday I was unwell. Today you are not well.
We zoomed into a scale where there is more action than I could imagine. Algae that hover and flash like satellites in the night sky. Miniscule prawn-like critters that hop across the screen. I strain the logic of my imagination to perceive this density of action within a tiny part of a water drop. I gaze out at this sea and strain my imagination to sense how it might continue and join to where you are and where I am.
I pause to take my damp jeans from the dryer - so that we might continue.
For now there is pause in the rain too and I can see to the horizon where before it was a blur of White. I think of your images of smoke and ice - these sheer material screens that partially reveal bodies.
This morning I drove through the thickest fog. It hugged to ground, thick and whitish grey,
revealing only a few meters ahead. Other cars' hazard lights flashed silently and out of sync.
It was spectacularly beautiful. I was listening back to the story about your friend who wrote very long sentences, who you delayed responding too and then, despite responding two years late in short sentences and having a nice mutual feeling, you fell out with. I imagine long sentences performed in a kind of fog like this where meaning and the body of the voice are constantly on the edge of being distinguishable.
I like this blurriness that is dense moisture in the air. I wonder if it too has living critters in it.
Planktons that take journeys to the clouds and then find themselves rained into totally other rivers.
I feel as though our communication takes time to float across these distances. It is not easy to synchronise. Perhaps this is a practice in groundless synchronisation, in floating attempts at floating together.
I think you described it as the parts that are indivisible, and then you also said, merging and synchronising, merging and synchronising.
I like how we often describe things as strange.