Carol Brown Dances: Carol Brown Writes

Carol Brown Writes

22.11.02

Photo: Carol Brown Dunedin, New Zealand

I have returned to the homeplace for two workshops, a performance event and to visit my family and familiars. Mattias Ek, the photographer has travelled with me and we are jointly running the workshop, Choreography of the Image on the Otago peninsula.

The opportunity to return to New Zealand has been enabled by the British Council and DANZ. As a British based but New Zealand born artist, I find myself in the peculiar position of being here as a familiar visitor, an insider outsider of sorts.

Having said this the experience of Charles Koroneho's Workshop on the Hoana Waititi Marae, a workshop which by its very location and constituency created the conditions of encounter between cultures and disciplines, has left a residue of difference, a sense of having been invited to witness or experience a Maori world view from the heart. The marae exists in the suburb of Henderson and yet it also exists in the cosmogony of the tangata whenua, in this sense it is a magical place where ancestral presence comingles with lived reality. Arriving from London with my toolbox of improvisational processes as readymades and levers for identity was perhaps a mistaken reliance on the known and already tested. I soon learnt that this place required a confronting of the embedded histories of these practices and their imposition of one order of material at the expense of another. I needed to listen. Is this not the way that naming works, in speaking on one tongue keeping silent another, in moving in one way suppressing something different, something foreign to my experience. The week on the marae in discussion, workshop process and in contemplation of the 'boundary post' that humming, vibrational place where thresholds are encountered, which are encountered as markers of events, traumas, passages from one moment in time to another. This inbetween space, and the negotiation of it was the abiding principle of our time together. Our time together in this post-colonial ecology of perception in this time of negotiated encounters.

Leaving Auckland, Mattias and I flew to Dunedin and the more familiar environment of the Otago peninsula. Here we stayed with a group of 11 dance artists and photographers over a six day period exploring bodiescapes, walkscapes and interscapes; that is the process of photography as a research tool towards the creation of images for choreography and performance. Each day began in the Portobello Hall with a movement class, this was followed by a walk with a specific focus. For example to make a body print in the landscape and record only the mark of the event; or to impose a narrative on the landscape, something that is foreign or jars with it; or to internalise a series of images sighted/sited and reproduce them as physical actions in the hall. The group was not afraid. We walked in rainy and windy conditions, we played and explored and were tutored by Mattias on how to hold, press and angle a camera, how to move my body in the process of recording an image in response to an existing moving body. The interscape process was the feedback and recycling of those images through performative process, embodying an image, projecting it, mutating it.

Mattias and I also managed to fit in a performance as part of the British Council Reception which was held for us at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It would have been strange to come to New Zealand and not perform so I was pleased that we could make this gesture, however provisionally in the setting of the gallery. Mattias performed a slide show and gave the invited audience an opportunity to see some extracts from Electric Fur, not yet premiered but soon, I performed Sleeping in Public with Mattias as my sleeping partner. It was daunting and a test to my performance resolve to walk up the stairs of the gallery to an invited audience of family, friends and familiar faces (many of whom I had not seen for 18 months +) all beaming at me. I wanted to say hello, but there was this distance between us, this performative space which held me in place and held them there as audience. We make bridges but the bridges between interior world and the exterior, between the environment and its people. It was not until after the performance that I was free to wander, mingle and remember each other. I come home under the cover of performance and this is how I greet you.

Email: carol@cranium.demon.co.uk

Other Entries: 01.07.03 | 22.11.02 | 16.05.02 | 18.09.01 | 29.01.01 | 21.09.00