Cliffsnotes Summary

In case you are new here, hello! Before I jump straight back into things anew, here is a little summary of what I’d covered so far on my blog.

Towards the end of 2020, I found myself in an almost unheard-of situation as an artist: I had funding and I had access to free studio space with no external pressure for a concrete outcome. I know.

Like many ‘unprecedented’ situations, this one grew out of Covid-19: the government had released an unplanned second round of financial support for artists who’d missed out the first time – definitely a welcome surprise for me! Interestingly, as we were well out of lockdown and back at work by then, the context in which I had applied for that support had shifted radically. This opened my options right up.

Cue many weeks of decision paralysis! I felt I needed a Big Project to put the money towards, but the Pandemic had hit at a transitory time for me; I had recently moved back to Canberra and did not have any major creative projects in the pipeline. In fact, most of my work at that time had been teaching dance, and I felt quite disconnected from my own creative interests – out of practice. I had many conversations around what I should do and where I should start, only some of which were helpful, but they kickstarted my thinking about different creative processes, what felt like a good fit for me and what didn’t.

I eventually started booking myself little windows of studio time – just to play. I figured I’d spend some time reconnecting to my dance practice and any creative thoughts and ideas floating in the back of my head, and from there I would decide on a Project that I could then seek further funding for. I was in that perfect, elusive position I always bemoaned as impossible as an indie choreographer: how often do we find supported time to workshop ideas and drum up supporting documentation BEFORE putting together the grant application to put that project into practice?

In my blog I documented the early days in the studio: the difficulties of working alone and facing the dancer’s equivalent of the blank page, how I came to structure my time to preserve my motivation and eventually create a methodology for solo dance practice that worked for me. By autumn 2021, I had established a residency at QL2 Dance that built these little windows of studio time into my week, and slowly, slowly came to realise that I was more interested in the method of practice itself than pursuing any Big Project Ideas.

This practice involved, as it still does, improvisation, stillness and writing (by hand), structured at intervals with the use of a meditation timer app. This app essentially became my director so I could take that hat off and focus purely on being the dancer. Within that structure, what I explored physically and mentally each day remained open, able to be tailored to meet my current needs, intention, energy and attention levels.

The main takeaways I had discovered and documented so far were related to the importance of return and repetition, along with an acceptance of creative ebb and flow, coming to see each day as a day within a series of days. The full details of these ups and downs can be read on the original blog if desired!

I feel a lot of discomfort with filming myself, and so I made that part of the practice as well – a larger or smaller part at various times during the residency. I did not do this in order to share or publish this footage – it was for my own use – but as my phone filled up with footage and my notebook filled with writing, I figured I should document the residency somehow, and eventually decided it was time to create my website and use it to publish the blog.

This was no small task with its associated learning curve, especially within whatever slices of time I could carve out between day jobs and the studio practice, and as it neared completion, I needed to quickly switch gears to focus on a looming grant application. It was therefore August before I published my first blog post, putting me well behind on the documentation project from the get go.

I continued to return to the studio to practice right up until I had a baby in early 2024, and continued writing the blog until mid-2023. It was sporadic at best, and as time stretched further away from the original ‘diary entries’ from the residency I was attempting to narrativize, I began to include contemporaneous material from the time of writing about what I was up to with various projects (many of which had indeed grown from this studio practice – hooray we come full circle!). Consequently, I only managed to cover the residency diary up to May 2021, two years behind at the time of the last post, and now a full four years ago.

Despite this significant gap, I intend to pick up the thread of this residency diary again here on Substack. My goal is to attempt to share the experience of my arts practice in a way that opens up broader conversations about creativity, process, solitude, improvisation, training and possibly even demystifies contemporary dance. Okay yes, I’ve set myself a bit of a high bar there, but hopefully, even if I fall short, I will improve on my first crack at the project and offer a bit of insight into this particular creative practice, all while continuing to explore this questionable activity of writing on and about dance.