FIGURE EIGHTS
Recently landed: Figure Eights
Gracia’s written response to Prue Langs’s POESIS, especially for Fjord Review.
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I may never know what it is like to be an octopus, but I can begin to imagine what it might be like if I was an octopus.[i] Equally, I may never know what it is like to be a dancer, and someone who communicates with their body, but, thanks to a special in-house showing of Prue Lang’s work-in-progress, POESIS, as part of her Australian Ballet’s residency program,[ii] I can imagine what it might be like if I were. And so it was, that I found myself once more, in the late afternoon, in the van Praagh studio, of the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, exploring surface and vulnerability as a gloved hand scuttled across the stage like a jewel-hued crustacean.
Announced at the start of the year, selected by The Australian Ballet’s artistic director, David Hallberg; choreographers, Stephanie Lake, and Bebe Miller; and Dancehouse’s Artistic Director, Josh Wright, Lang and Deanne Butterworth were the successful recipients of the Australian Ballet’s 2024–25 Residency Program. While Butterworth will commence her residency in 2025, to work on Half Half, Lang has just concluded her studio residency, presenting, revealing, five explorations in the first creative development, POESIS, with her collaborators Benjamin Hancock and Amber McCartney. Together, in their own kind of coevolution, they have explored “a multivalent world of immanent relationships, environmental immersion, and sensory immediacy,”[iii] springing from Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt[iv] and the origins of the word ‘poesis’: to make. Uexküll’s unknown worlds of an animal’s experience “revealed only to our mind’s eye and not to our body’s” seems like a wonderful seabed to make into dance.
[i] Thomas Nagel’s posed, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ in which the answer is, to be a bat is impossible to know. “The analogical form of the English expression “what it is like” is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles,” but rather “how it is for the subject himself.” Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, Volume. 83, No. 4, 1974, p 440, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914, accessed 4th May, 2024.
[ii] Previous recipients of The Australian Ballet’s 2022–23 inaugural Residency Program, which provides each choreographer with a stipend of $18,000 and access to the centre’s studio space and facilities at The Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, include interdisciplinary artist, Sandra Parker, and Artistic Director of the Northern Territory Dance Company, Gary Lang.
[iii] Elisha Cohn, ‘Paperback Tigers: Breaking the Zoo’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter 2015), p 581, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24735044, accessed 4th May, 2024.
[iv] “Umwelt theory offers an understanding both of species and their evolution that is characterized by radical interdependence. It asserts that species cannot be properly understood other than in relation to the environments they inhabit, and specifically to those aspects of their environments that are relevant to their existence and with which they are… in Uexküll’s own favourite metaphor, in a kind of “contrapuntal musical performance..” Una Chaudhuri, ‘Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3, 2013, p 324, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24580496, accessed 4th May, 2024.
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11th of May, 2024
