Improcinemaniac

by Dianne Reid originally published on in Brolga 40

In This Article

In this paper, Dianne demonstrates the intersections of her research/practice, mixing live and screen bodies, poetic and academic writing. She is posing an improvisational approach to screendance and an embodied approach to writing as possibilities for seeing, imagining and being in the dancing, researching body. She is interrogating her own embodied knowledge as hybrid site within a live screendance body.

Preface

This essay had its first development as a ‘performed paper,’ presented at The Little Con-ference, an improvisation and performance research exchange in Melbourne, and the Light Moves Symposium, part of a screendance festival in Limerick, Ireland in 2014. In those contexts the paper was read/danced from a long corridor of paper crossing the front section of the performance space. As dancer/reader, this author moved from stage right to left facing and addressing the audience who ‘read’ my performance in tandem with video imagery projected behind me, reading from left to right, as you might read a book, and from foreground to background, as the camera reads cinematic space. The projected video imagery or text faded in and out in a duet with my live performance as I progressed across space and time, showing examples of my improvisational practice captured and re-sited into a screendance context, or animating quotations in text that moved within the frame in ways that alluded to a three-dimensionality, a dance of words. Sometimes fragments of text appeared as they were spoken live as a way of amplifying a point and shifting the depth of field of the event. Sometimes I directed an audience member to read a line of text, which was written in reverse on the paper roll. Finally the screendance Red Rattler, an edited artifact of this hybrid screen/performance practice (which I am naming ‘live screendance’), was screened in concert with the reading of my Love Poem for the Red Rattler.

My challenge in this next development of this practice is to attempt to imbue these pages with three-dimensionality—as I move between the poetic and the descriptive, to bring the tone of my body into the frame of the document, to make sensation make sense. My appeal to you, reader, is to consider the micro-dance of your eyes, the tone of your optic nerve connecting back to the top of your spine, as you shift from left to right of this frame or into another plane to access the video hyperlinks.

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The negotiations of relationship—a conversation about dance improvisation

by Melinda Smith  & Dianne Reid in Brolga 41

This paper is a conversation about building depth in our relationships with our bodies and our meeting points with each other. Framed within the context of an improvisational dance practice, the authors, Dianne Reid and Melinda Smith, reflect upon their long-term shared dance practice, their evolving performance work, Dance Interrogations, and the cultural shifts possible as a result of long-term artistic practice. Their unique, long-standing collaboration (over six years and continuing) is unique in Australia and internationally. It is a collaboration which challenges deeply held beliefs around the low expectations of people who have a disability and explores the choreographic potential in the body and artist who experiences Cerebral Palsy—a condition affecting the muscular and skeletal system and which can make voluntary movement such as that in dance, difficult. Their practice itself constantly shifts between artistic formats in both studio and performance contexts, and draws upon a range of technologies familiar within the cultures of screendance and disability. This account is improvisational, an undoing of structure, to encourage other angles and depths of perception.