Camera and Dance: on collaboration, improvisation and returning

Reflections on ngurrak-al marram-u / body of the mountain, Burrinja Gallery, 2025

Laki Sideris, August 2026

1. The works

Gretel Taylor and I had three works in ngurrak-al marram-u / body of the mountain at Burrinja Gallery, May-July 2025.

All three came out of On Country / In Residence, a three-day, forty-kilometre walking residency across Corhanwarrabul, the Dandenong Ranges, on Wurundjeri Country, in October 2024. Eight artists took part, hosted by BodyPlaceProject. BodyPlaceProject is a platform for performance, art and research about relationships with place, led by Gretel, with Gülsen Özer, Tammy Wong Hulbert and myself as key artists. Gretel curated the exhibition with Özer and Wurundjeri artist Mandy Nicholson, who gave it its Woiwurrung title.

The exhibition ran across three rooms. We shared ours with Jill Orr. Forest Walk ran nine metres along one wall, a narrow band of photographs hung low. To see the individual pictures you had to move along the wall and bend down. Supermoon took a good part of another wall: eight photographs of Gretel dancing in the forest at night, held by flash while the moon drew a different white mark through each frame. The dance is already underway was a large projected video and a parallel four channel video on a separate monitor. The projection was eight minutes. The monitor held twelve hours.

The works came from the same place and were made in quite different ways. Forest Walk came from the entire walk. Supermoon was made in a night. The dance is already underway took twelve hours to shoot, and days to edit and install.

One question I had ran under all three works. Can a camera move with a place, and with a body in it, without fixing either?

2. Camera and Dance

Gretel and I have been making work together since 2017, in Greece, Venice, Iceland, and mostly in Victoria, Australia - in forests and on beaches, with still cameras, video cameras, drones and GoPros. Some works have developed over months. Others were completed in five minutes because the kids were waiting in the car. We see somewhere, stop, grab a camera and make something.

The speed does not make it casual. Gretel has around thirty years of knowing her body and how she works in relation to place. I have forty years of finding pictures inside things that move and do not wait for me.

Before Gretel I photographed jazz, thousands of frames over many years in small rooms. It was documentation, but I never thought of it as such. At a gig you are located by the environment. You are quiet. You move by stealth and wait for gaps. You watch one musician against another, a face eclipsing a light, a body against an empty part of the room, and when it works you find a tension and hold it. (Sideris 2006–14; James 2014)

That is pretty much what I do with dance. The difference is that with Gretel I can enter it. I do not have to stay at the edge of the performance. I can move towards her, around her, in front of her, backwards with her. I can crouch, stand, leave and come back. I can actually dance with her.

The style can change completely. Black and white, colour, flash, drone, still, moving image. The method is more persistent. We respond to the place and to each other. I look for the tensions and try to hold them. Gretel has her own method. I know it well enough to work with it.

Gretel’s practice came out of Body Weather, which she studied with Min Tanaka in Japan, and has since evolved into the practice she calls 'locating’. (Taylor 2010)

Mine comes from photographic traditions and from particular photographers. Larry Fink for tight teetering compositions of bodies in a room. Todd Hido for returning again and again to take the picture. Trent Parke for being inside the thing rather than in front of it.

She describes locating as a process always heading towards presence with place, which may never arrive. I came at something similar from the other direction, out of paying intense attention to scenes that are never still, where figures and objects vie for focus in continuous flow.

I lean strongly on form. I like to think in musical analogies. Jazz has its ii-V-Is, flamenco its compás, a tsamiko its syncopation and flourishes. None of it says what will happen. It gives the improvisation something to grip. The resulting work looks very different to previous work. Gretel and I do not share a scaffold and we do not need to.

We began using the credit terms Camera and Dance for our contributions respectively. I like the plainness of it. A record label might say piano and bass. Camera names my role and Dance names hers. Camera can include shooting, editing, grading, sound and sequence. Dance contains an equivalent depth I cannot see easily from the outside.

The weighting changes from work to work. Often the conceptual premise is mostly Gretel’s. Sometimes a photographic or editing decision shifts the work somewhere she did not expect. Sometimes we disagree. I do not think collaboration is compromise. Compromise suggests two finished positions giving something up. The useful part for me is discovery. Something can appear between two practices that neither would have made alone. I am constantly surprised by what we create.

3. How do you photograph a forest?

The Corhanwarrabul forest has too much in it. The gum trees go manically everywhere. Branches cut through light, a fern becomes important because it is close and then something behind it takes over. There are photographs everywhere and no particular reason why one view should be the shot. I did not want to hunt for the good tree or the beautiful tangle of roots. I did not want a photograph that announced: forest.

Other artists on the residency were working directly with Country, ecology, geological time, cultural erasure and climate. I did not want to take one of those ideas into the forest and then find the picture that illustrated it. I wanted to look first.

Early in the walk I decided to take a photograph every hundred metres or so. Not strictly. I did not measure it. The camera sat mainly at waist height, about the height of a child, and I focused mostly at around a metre and a half so the forest further away went soft. It was enough of a rule to stop me searching for the photograph.

I had been thinking about how a three-year-old sees. Not wonder. More acceptance, maybe pleasure. A small child can spend a long time looking at the wrong thing because they do not yet know which thing is meant to matter.

For three days during the residency I walked, stopped, looked, made a photograph and walked again. There was comfort in the repetition. Three days is not long enough to know a forest, but it is long enough to stop arriving all the time. You come back the next morning and the act of being there has become familiar. Todd Hido calls his own returning a kind of ruminating, going back to the same suburbs over and over until the work slowly changed (Hido 2014, p.33)

There is a pleasure in an image going into focus and then out. It is negotiating with itself to be seen. Something close becomes clear and something behind it gives way. I choose where to stand and where roughly to focus, but I do not need to get the whole thing. I do not want the whole thing.

Somewhere along the walk one of the others stopped and pointed upwards. I had been looking at the ground for two days. Above us one tree had grown around another and was hugging it. I took the photograph, and it broke the rule I had set. It is in the nine metre photograph. The rule was there to stop me hunting for a theme or a concept. It was not to stop me looking. Only my dodgy knee did that.

What Forest Walk came to be was a way of seeing without trying to contextualise. To observe, but not to claim understanding.

4. Supermoon

There was a supermoon during the residency, and it was quite a big one and I knew I wanted to include it in a picture. After a day of walking, Gretel and I slipped out of the house we were staying in with the group and went back into the forest. It felt like two kids sneaking out of a party. We came back in, giggling, about thirty minutes later.

I knew what I was going to do with the camera. Flash with a long exposure, a technique I have used many times on wedding dance floors. The flash holds the body for a fraction of a second and the longer exposure keeps recording the available light while the camera moves. At a wedding it is fairy lights or coloured LEDs. In the forest it was the moon.

I followed Gretel and kept positioning myself so the moon stayed somewhere in the frame. The flash caught her. My hands moved through the rest of the exposure and the moon became a scribble, different each time. You shoot blindly like this, because the viewfinder goes black during the exposure. You only see the results later. Except for technical reasons, I never check photographs during a shoot.

There are two different times in each frame. The flash catches Gretel for a fraction of a second. The shutter stays open while my hands continue to move, so the moon records that movement as a line. Her movement is stopped for an instant and mine remains in the photograph.

Gretel was not doing a sequence for the camera and I was not putting her into positions. She moved and I moved with her. We kept making frames until the leeches made her stop, and we went back inside.

Later Gretel wanted three or four photographs at most to be exhibited. I wanted the longer sequence. For me, eight are a body of work and four are four pictures. Across a sequence the dancer stops being a person and becomes movement. Gretel wanted fewer so as not to be the centre of it. She had concepts to do with her body being peripheral to the place. While I was sulking, Gülsen and Jill Orr made the case for me, and the eight went on the wall.

We wanted the same thing. She would take herself away by subtraction. I would take her away by repetition.

Looking at the sequence after the shoot, I saw a question about how presence in a place can be held, and how movement can be stilled. What remains when the movement has passed.

5. Twelve hours and eight minutes

The largest work came from a twelve hour durational performance for camera in Sherbrooke Forest. Gretel spent the day in it dancing continually. A GoPro on a tripod recorded without stopping and I returned every few hours with another camera and shot video handheld. The fixed camera and the moving camera produced almost opposite kinds of material.

Gretel wrote afterwards that the idea was to join in the dance of the place with the ecologies already interacting there. She also wrote about the camera as an intrusive captor and her own body as a colonial interloper, awkward and inadequate. (Taylor 2025)

During my filming of her dance, I walked, crouched and stood. I went towards Gretel, away from her, put trees between us, focused on plants and water, then back. She came in and out of the frame. I was not recording a finished performance from a useful position. I was making the film while she was making the dance.

The focus was shallow. It let a thing take the stage for a while and then give it back. Gretel would come forward and disappear, a fern would sharpen, water would take over. I could decide where to stand and where to move, but I could not settle all the relations in advance.

It is like swimming in the ocean. You can swim in a direction and you have agency in the swim, but the water still moves you. You are in it. The shallow focus let me photograph Gretel and the forest that way. I was taken by her movement and the forest’s, and I still had some agency. I could find a tension, hold it for a while, and then it changed.

It is like how I shoot any event or performance. The camera is never neutral because I am not neutral. I am moving, waiting, choosing, feeling where one thing pulls against another. The difference is that Gretel knows I am in the dance, and I know her practice well enough to move inside it.

The handheld material was edited over a few days. I had roughly an hour and cut it to eight minutes. The shooting had been responsive and improvised. The edit was not, at least not in the same way. There was no script, but it was carefully put together. We both had strong opinions on the cut. I selected, ordered, graded and built a beginning and an end.

The soundtrack came from ultrasonic frequencies emitted by plants and earthworms, slowed and dropped in pitch so they became audible. Nobody standing in the forest heard that sound. The finished film is not simply what happened in Sherbrooke Forest. There was a day in the forest and there was material from that day, and the film was made from it.

This does not make the shooting less documentary. The point is that documentation does not require the photographer to disappear. I documented the jazz and wedding gigs by moving with the music. Here I documented by moving with Gretel and the forest, and then made a short film from the material.

Gretel wanted less of herself in the film. Her premise put the body out of the centre. My pictures tend to find a figure and use it to give the rest of the image its weight/s. The figure is not necessarily the subject. It is one of the points that lets the rest of the field pull against something. We had to work through that difference. She approved every take and the dark epilogue at the end of the film was her decision. I made the actual cuts.

The GoPro presented another problem. Twelve hours is easy to record and difficult to put in a gallery. I proposed four channels, staggered so each view showed a different part of the day and the combination kept changing across the duration. The full twelve hours remained. Nothing was selected out. Time was rearranged instead.

The eight-minute film projection did the opposite. Almost everything was removed. One work kept the day and distributed it. The other chose from the day and built another thing. In the room they sat beside each other.

6. The room

The making continued in installing the exhibition room. When I first thought about showing the forest photographs I considered animation or papering a wall. Then I saw the space and stopped asking how to present the photographs. I asked how I would dance the forest in it. That question came from years of working with Gretel, and from a work she is not in.

The answer was the nine-metre wall. I wanted the viewer to have to do the walk to see it. Standing back gave you the frieze but not the pictures. To see the pictures you had to move along the wall and bend down, seeing one part, moving, seeing another. The work was made that way too. Walk, stop, look, move on. There is no single position from which the forest resolves.

The nine metres is framed. We assembled the frame in the room and drilled it into the wall, which left a great many holes to be filled afterwards. The projector had no dedicated mount, so it went up on whatever we could improvise and the image had to be levelled with gaffer tape. Every part of it was a small problem, and then another one. The gallery curator helped with all of it, and I suspect we tried his patience more than he wanted it tried.

Before Jill Orr’s work with which we would be sharing the space arrived, I had built up an imaginary version of it in my head from what I knew: photographs and a three-dimensional work using sticks, branches and mud from the hills. It became a small forest, perhaps something that would decay over the run of the show, and I imagined its shadows reaching towards Forest Walk.

What arrived was As The Crow Flies: a standing tangle of bare sticks and branches on the gallery floor, and photographs of a figure in hi-vis and a hard hat holding a pole, with a road sign at its base reading SLOW, upside down. Nothing decayed over the seven weeks. The branches stayed as they were. But the pieces worked well together. There was an airiness in the room that felt considered.

Sounds created their own compositions. Listening to the Mountain Body a sound work by Gülsen Özer and Aarti Jadu installed in the adjoining gallery carried into our room. Its song cycle, composed by Dalys Hill from Özer’s poem translated into Woiwurrung by Mandy Nicholson, mixed in the air with the subterranean sound of our film. Nobody had composed the arrangement created by the sound bleed between spaces. Yet it was what a visitor heard. We put ours on headphones so it could be heard as it was made, but I enjoyed the remix. It added a layer nobody had planned.

7. Returning

I want to know things, but I do not want the knowing to finish the work. The pleasure of not knowing is curiosity. It means there is still something to attend to. The forest gave me three days to return and repeat. Gretel gives me another practice to move with.

Forest Walk was made by returning to the same act every hundred metres. Supermoon came from a curiosity about how to hold motion in a still. The video work came from a pleasure in moving in real time, responding to the nuanced motion of a figure against a forest.

Gretel and I were improvising inside structures we each know how to navigate, and we do not share a method. The dance is already underway and we gently joined in for a little while.

We arrive and then we arrive again. And again.

References

James, D. 2014, World’s Best Jazz Club: The Story of Bennetts Lane, Major Street Publishing, Highett, Vic.

Sideris, L. 2006–14, Melbourne Jazz in Photographs,lakisideris.com/melbournejazzphotos.

Hido, T. 2014, Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude, The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture, New York.

Taylor, G. 2010, ‘Empty? A critique of the notion of “emptiness” in Butoh and Body Weather training’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.

Taylor, G. 2025, artist statement for The dance is already underway, exhibition label, ngurrak-al marram-u / body of the mountain, Burrinja Gallery.

BodyPlaceProject, bodyplaceproject.com