DANCING OVER ASHES

DANCE

2 Oct

Recently landed: Dancing over Ashes

We chat to Rosalind Crisp after her last performance of The real time it takes… at Dancehouse, especially for Fjord Review.

Gracia Haby: On National Threatened Species Day, 7th September, 2023, Australia added more than 40 plants and animals to its list of threatened wildlife, including the Bulloak jewel butterfly, Kate’s leaf-tail gecko, and 16 types of native spiny crayfish. Twenty-two of the species entered the list at the highest threat status, critically endangered, and most of the 48 were affected by the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires.

Under the weight of this, how do you go on, personally, or professionally, or are they both the same?

Rosalind Crisp: I think going out and dancing in places has really helped me a lot to sort of accept it all, and it feels like dancing sort of helps, but it goes both ways, because I am not a fulltime activist and sometimes I feel like I don’t do enough. But I can’t give up dancing, otherwise I’d be useless to the world, so I think what I’m trying to do—where I’ve gone lately, and what the power of performing is—is to disarm people. It puts them in a place where they are receptive. Then you just put a little bit in and maybe it goes a long way. I have noticed that with people. People will cry during the show. The woman who started the Tipping Point organisation, she was here last Saturday, and she was just beside herself, and so I think it can have an effect like that. But I don’t know. I don’t think it fixes everything. But everybody has to do their bit, play the role, and, you know, because my sister, Louise Crisp, is so active, she’s an activist and a writer, and also Lisa Roberts, of Friends of Bats and Habitat Gippsland, who takes a lot of my photographs. I think, “Oh, I don’t do as much as them.” And sometimes I support them, go with them, or write to the local newspaper and spotlight different species. I got completely vilified by the local newspaper. They put big one-page ads in about how they were going to take me to court. And it is a small town. So I retreated for a while. But I started writing again under a different name. So, what can I do? I like writing letters, and sometimes I can’t get to sleep because where we live, it’s so anti the forest.