Video works (2017 -)
Expanded from a live site-responsive performance practice, BodyPlaceProject create photographic and video works that reveal somatic and thematic resonances of place.
Scourge 1
Tactile engagement with corrosive and crystalline qualities of salt is evoked through close-range images of dancer Gretel Taylor’s body immersed in sites in the Murray Darling region. In contrast, drone footage of Taylor’s site-responsive dance reveals the vast context of whitened landscape. Scourge suggests salinity and other ecological imbalances in this region parallel the other 'scourge of whiteness' since colonisation, lamenting our greed and insensitivity to the ecologies that have sustained millennia.
Dance - Gretel Taylor
Video - Laki Sideris
Music - Warren Smith
SALT BODY exhibition, curated by Gareth Hart, Arts Mildura Gallery, 2019
Scourge 2
Dance - Gretel Taylor
Video - Laki Sideris
Music - Warren Smith
SALT BODY exhibition, curated by Gareth Hart, Arts Mildura Gallery, 2019
Co-habit
From the Anthropause or quietening of human life necessitated by Covid-19, the possibility emerged for a kind of re-positioning of humans and the non-human world, whereby we might take a less domineering role. As we rush to return to our anthropocentric lives, Co-habit is a reminder of this possibility.
Dance - Gretel Taylor
Video & Sound - Laki Sideris
2021, Holding Pattern, screen-based exhibition, Burrinja
2022, Official Selection, 2nd International Ecoperformance Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Hearth
‘Whose place is this anyway and do I fit in?’
The familiarity of home is unstuck and re-rendered as Gretel’s body is curiously orientated in domestic space, probing questions of belonging, disjunction from and re-inhabitation of place.
HEARTH was created in a ruined house on Maria Island, Tasmania, which has been part of the land and waters of the Puthikwilayti people for over 40,000 years, a penitentiary settlement from 1825-50, and is now a national park teeming with wildlife.
Dance - Gretel Taylor
Photography - Laki Sideris
Sound - Warren Smith
HEARTH was presented as part of House-Body MAP Moreland, curated by Tony Yap.
Siteworks, Brunswick, 2019.
Wardrobe
‘Wardrobes with their shelves […] are veritable organs of the secret psychological life…’
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Dance - Gretel Taylor
Video - Laki Sideris
From series: Poetics of Home, 2020
This project curated by Gretel Taylor invited dancers with expertise in site-specificity and creating dance for video, to draw inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's classic text, The Poetics of Space, to create short screendance works with/in their homes.
Created during the COVID-19 lockdown period, the project focuses on close-range kinaesthetic relationships with familiar objects and architecture, revisiting Bachelard's Poetics as a catalyst for danced departures. Bachelard transformed domestic spaces by articulating their psychic and mnemonic effects, to render these relationships alive, intriguing, shimmering.
Supported by City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.
LAUNCH: 26th June 2020
Poetics of Home series was then screened for Dance (Lens), Dancehouse, 2021.