I CAME HERE TO DANCE:
Notes on survival


Here is a coalface, a pandemic;
a surge that has caused all kinds of realigning and despair.
What is valuable, meaningful - 'good' - now?
WHO is valuable and worth saving?

I keep thinking, as I observe some kinds of knowledges lauded over others, that, well, 'I came here to dance'. Or, I was put in this world to do that.

And I wonder if it - the dance - is 'valuable'?
BUT
It feels to me the only thing (left) to do:
or, the most logical doing.







But we are not dancing in the ways we have been. Instead we are imagining, remembering, grieving, encountering new thresholds. We make contact with what was to be-with what remains, bodily. In this new world order we are dancers yet: so much stillness, so much movement.


'Notes on survival' is a project with a short and brilliant life. A supernova. Reverent and irreverent. Part of it is made visible as online documents; catchments of words sent down virtual pages on a raw website. Here, the results of discreet conversations emergent from the body-minds of a handful of dancer artists; each and all deep in the question of what was (that), what is here now, what does my body remember, what would it, and we, rather forget?


Erosion, death, bones, fury and metal limbs: enfolded all.

I declare - I was once a Horse and now, NOW! I am a Whalerider.

This time is different baby - it is slower, wider, older.


In the spirit of managing instability (job of the dancer ), and working in the deep dark (also job of the dancer), I pen this in duet(s) with colleagues who span age, experience, lives lived and dances danced. Each encounter was recorded, and I, Whalerider, wrote a response. The artists have responded in whatever essential way they felt possible in this now.


This is inter-corporeal convergence of a different kind.


* From Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

The SURVIVAL Notes:

Below are eight links to eight separate conversations with dance artists that took
place between June and August (2020) while in various stages of lockdown due to Covid-19.

Most artists are somewhere in Victoria, some are not.

These are living documents, undertaken with body (in absentia) and a history of moving as the pith.


Each link leads to EXCERPTS of text written by Whalerider Paea, a LINK to the full-length writings (by Leach) and
individual artist responses as writing, image, movement.

I CAME HERE TO DANCE

NOTES ON SURVIVAL: 'Ko ahau te tohorā, te tohorā ko ahau’
(I am the whale, and the whale is me)

PAEA LEACH: Whalerider
dancer, instigator, dance-writer, curator

This project is supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 artist emergency grants.

Deep thanks to super academic artist, writer Nancy Mauro-Flude for web design/advice and help.

PAEA is a Ngāti Kuri (Northland, Aotearoa)/ Australian artist, mother, dance maker, performer, writer based in Naarm. Her work prefaces sensation over sensationalism, and works to harness potentiality through working with attuned attention to kinaesthetic data on the move. She has performed in Australia and internationally - micro to macro, independent to large company. She teaches and she treats, she listens and engages in conversation. She attempts to push, morph and blow-up the confines of how she perceives herself, the world, the process of making work, and, importantly, the dance.
This project was borne as a result of Covid confines: it asks, how do the new conditions compel one to make - still(?)
Through this all, P has come to realise we are now dancing in 'the expanded field', and maybe that is the best place for the dancing to be happening.

IMAGE:
Gregory Lorenzutti,
'Survival: Efforts toward continuousness', 2018.