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1.

Recently I have had to foreground what I am saying, until this moment here.
This is who I am. I am me walking, alongside Paea.
This is us dancing. This is us dancing

I do not have to say:

“IF I MOVE TO THE LEFT OF YOU PAEA, it might feel like this, YOU MIGHT FEEL LIKE THIS AND THEN YOU MIGHT FEEL LIKE THAT AND THEN we might coalesce!!! THERE MIGHT BE AN INTELLIGENT THOUGHT THAT MIGHT INTERSECT AND THEN!!!!!”

Are you with me Paea?

5.

But the taboo of it and the absurdity of that taboo, well, it really is, is quite powerful sweetheart.

NO – Arts!
IT MUST NOT, IT MUST NOT BE therapy (emphatically heralded from the bush)

Incredible.

You know.

A: Can I say something – but first, I am going to take a photo.
photo

7.

A: Of course, you know the bush is not about purity and idealism – this is dangerous when we talk about the body.

But I have taken a photo of this plant – a sweet pittosporum – and it is a weed in here, and it just looks sweet, but it is a weed in here.
Nothing is perfect and there it is.

Wait!

12.
Tears//

She is turning to look where she has come from

I wait

My sternum has been coming more into my awareness as we talk

13.

A: I think I am coming into the last decade of my life.

. . . . . . . . .

12 July 2020

She: Barrm Birrm bushland (place of many yams), Riddells Creek, VIC
I: House, Melbourne, VIC

"Alice and I walked danced through the bushland near her home one morning.
Only, I was not there.

A stumble dance with a series of beginnings & chortles for the necessity of irreverence, much belly laughing and announcing of new topographies!

I re-wrote our dance walk as 33 utterances: a choreography in words concerned with spatiality, absence and the terrain of the 'acceptable'.

An audacious morning and a rendering of a conversation spanning 50 years.

Here, excerpts from the 33 codas (or cards or scores)".

31.

Patti Smith makes an entrance.

29.

P: I imagine you will dance until the day before you die A.
A:
No! The hour!
Yes! The hour
And then I will say, lets have a small rest and a glass of champagne, then I shall lie down and that will be it.

Higher ground, a new topography. You go girl!

ALICE Cummins is a dance artist and Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner with a 30-year history of contemporary performance making, collaborating with musicians, writers, visual artists and filmmakers.
Alice’s practice enables compositional refinement and distillation of experience into performance through the coalescence of aesthetics|ethics and physiology. Her work reflects the entanglement of cultural, social, and personal matter in a relational field, recognizing we are always of the body. Alice has been a teacher and mentor to a generation of Australian dance and theatre artists.

Recent performances include: lead female role in The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, filmed on location in Nepal, directed by Cedric Cheung-lau [NYC], Sundance (2020); Evanescence, Amos Gebhardt’s film installation, Adelaide Biennial, (2018); The Australian Ugliness, (Eugenia Lim, 2017-18); disappearance, (Michele Theunissen, 2016-18); In Memory of the Last Sunset, (Neha Choksi, 20th Biennale of Sydney 2016).