THE REAL TIME IT TAKES…

DANCE

6 Sept

Recently landed: Real time

Gracia’s written response to Rosalind Crisp’s The real time it takes…, especially for Fjord Review.

Subscribe to and support Fjord Review.

In the Upstairs Studio at Dancehouse, Rosalind Crisp hands me a small card which invites me to “Please sit where you want and move wherever you want.” She motions to the small light fixture on the wall, should I need it, to illuminate the printed text. I hold my card up to the light, following the person before me, and read the second sentence which grounds the first: “while I made 23 contemporary dance pieces for the moment we extinguished 23 Australian bird species for ever …” A warm welcome note with a sobering tail, it sets the tone for an ‘of sorts’ retrospective by one of Australia’s most rigorous and significant dance artists.[i] The real time it takes…, heralds the promotional material, promises to be celebration of “40 years of relentlessly undoing dance” by the “Mick Jagger of Australian dance.” On opening night, a series of lines from extinction risk status to legendary status hover in the air, and all before I’ve found a place to perch.

A series of low display cases over which to peer are positioned about the studio. In one, Crisp’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Dame of the Arts), awarded in 2015, rests upon a black, padded base. A photo of Crisp alongside it, “looking like a mix between Bowie and Jagger,” comments long-term collaborator, Andrew Morrish. Swagger detectable even in stillness, this photo from then is very much now, as Crisp quietly saunters about the room, and sidles up behind the audience as they take in the mementos. Was it Crisp, herself, who stood nearby and uttered something about the ‘coffin-like’ nature of the display-case? A casket of memories of a full life, still very much in swing; don’t nail it shut yet; I’m still breathing; still tracing lines with my form; still leaving a trail. Or in the process of noticing and connections, am I imagining this?

[i] Rosalind Crisp, “The real time it takes…”, Dancehouse Season Two program notes, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/S0223-program-notes.pdf, accessed 31st August, 2023, p. 6.