Slow Choreographies

Slow Choreographies 2021-2024

Everyday sexisms within Australian universities are like shape shifters that move between bodies, hide inside policies and behind closed doors. This interdisciplinary research project examines how a slow choreographic methodology enables embodied creative processes to give social phenomena a tangible dimension. Centrally situated within an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities (Everyday Sexisms), this research project thickens, extends, and informs the development of the Everyday Sexisms’ methods and findings in two ways. First, by highlighting how bodies, movement, and objects are involved in the choreography of institutional everyday sexisms. Secondly, by utilising creative data emergent from four artworks to contribute to each phase of the Everyday Sexisms. These artworks include a set of three short Video-Vignettes, a participatory artwork Here There Again, a suite of textile sculptures, and a 40-minute choreographic work, titled and Again. This PhD threads the data from these artworks through the Everyday Sexisms phases, weaving a slow interdisciplinary landscape that contributes how to practically re-frame, re-imagine and resist sexisms.

To access the exegesis click here.

PHASE ONE | HERE THERE AGAIN | JUNE 2022

Here, in this place, at this time, toward this place;

There, at that place, so far as, in that respect;

Again, in the opposite direction, back or toward a former place;

Slow  relational, accumulative, and lasting effects;

Choreographies      of the ephemeral and embodied encounters.

HERE THERE AGAIN is a mapping of everyday sexisms within Australian universities. The work invites you to pinpoint the banal and slippery encounters that you’ve had on campus, whether via emails, down hallways, across classrooms, or in front of doorways. 

How do you give form to something that is at times perceived to be absent? How do you locate a moment that has gone by too soon? By walking and talking with early career researchers (ECR) from Edith Cowan’s School of Science and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, the work began by unpacking spatial and temporal understandings of individual’s experiences of everyday sexisms. Mapped through a series of creative outputs (written vignettes, photography, rugs, and notated building plans) this interdisciplinary project is an attempt to give physical dimension to an otherwise fleeting phenomenon.

This phase of the research was presented as part of #FEAS Unfinished Buisness Exhibition at Spectrum Gallery (Edith Cowan University). These outputs mark a point in a longer research journey, it is ongoing, a slow moment amid gathering data. The words here, there, again are a rendering of sexisms reality, and a reality that stretches sideways as much as it stretches forward and backward. The work builds a catalogue of everyday sexisms through spatial citations, amplifying how gender inequalities stretch across time and space. It’s ongoing and the work of intervening is never finished. 

PHASE three | Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts | OCTOBER 2022

Eight weeks Studio Residency to continue exploring Slow Choreographies Phase 1 (see above) and expand on the data gathered.

Key elements were tufting, slime, qualitative survey data and digital reporting.

Creative Focus Groups were run during this time with working academics to assist in the analysis of the data gathered.

PHASE FOUR | CHOREOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT WITH LINK DANCE COMPANY

and Again was a choreographic response to the different phases of Slow Choreographies PhD, it worked with the 11 dancers to create a 40-minute contemporary dance work and continues to extend the research findings through the affective resonances experienced by the audience.

To read more about this work follow this link here