Indigo Perry is a writer and performance artist. Her book Midnight Water: A Memoir (Picador) was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. She is a Senior Lecturer in Writing & Literature in the School of Communication & Creative Arts at Deakin University.
Indigo Perry
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Dance of the writer: A poetics
This essay incorporates a poetics for a blended set of practices, exploring a question posed by Louppe: ‘what path does the artist follow to reach the point where the artistic practice is available to perception, there where our consciousness can discover it and begin to resonate with it?’
I focus on an embodied dance of myself as writer, tracing a path to the availability of perception of this work, moving from a 5Rhythms movement practice that reminds me I have a body, to my first gestures towards beginning to write with pen and paper again after a period of depression, and the accidental witnesses/audiences I attract for a daily practice that slowly, gradually becomes a consciously framed performance practice. Along the way, I document a series of performances, from Lake Tyrell in Victoria’s Mallee region; to Federation Square in Melbourne’s central business district; to the public streets where my performance practice continues today.
The dance of the writer, for me, comes to embody a three-dimensionality of poetry, one that reveals to me new tools for writing and a blended practice of writing and dance.