Moving to Substack

I have decided to give it another crack.

Hello! Welcome back.

This documentation project has been on the backburner for quite some time, but I am slowly, slowly reemerging from maternity leave and have found that I am not yet ready to shelve it for good.

In my last post nearly two years ago, I was already floating the idea of changing up the format of the blog as I felt things had been getting muddier the more time that elapsed. I felt a real tension between recording all the detail of my experience of practice and trying to keep things snappier – easier to read and easier to post on a more regular basis. Now, with an almost-toddler in the picture, I have even less time for this labour of love so I have been searching for a new way to tackle it and find momentum.

I can’t entirely articulate why I think Substack might be any easier than writing here on my own website, but I do try in my first post over there. I’ve included the full post below, and I may duplicate my writing across both platforms for a while yet, but if you have been following along with me so far, subscribing to my Substack will be the best way to continue from here on.

A note on subscriptions –

Moving to Substack does not mean I will not be pay-walling any of my writing, as it would definitely be counterproductive towards one of my main goals of the project! However, as this is a labour of love, I’ve created a Ko-Fi page where you can ‘tip’ me for my work if you enjoy it.

My heartfelt thanks to you for being here!

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On Writing about Dance

and why?

O & J Wikner Photography

I’ve always wanted to like dance writing. To be one of those people with a shelf full of old Brolga journals and Dancehouse Diaries alongside my show programs. After all, I am a dancer who loves reading. But the fact is, dance exists because it does what other artforms cannot. I mean no disrespect the scores of dance writers out there and I’m grateful for all their work, but I, like other dancers and dance-goers, would (to date) rather be experiencing dance than reading about it.

In recent years, I have established a solo dance practice: part nourishing ritual, part necessary training. It has been what I have needed it to be - centring and generative, motivating and sustaining. Publicly documenting this was intended to be part of the process, but it didn’t come naturally. Sharing dance more broadly than with its immediate, temporarily fixed audience, would arguably be best achieved with a video or image-based platform, but I am no YouTuber and have no affinity with Instagram (which should surely quit the ‘Insta’ portion of its name considering all that’s involved? The staging, lighting, framing, capturing, editing, captioning, describing, scheduling…). No, in order to share, I find myself much more compelled to write.

Accordingly, I embarked on a blog to record my process – perhaps an outmoded form, but I wanted to be completist, verbose, I wanted to get it all down, and then it would be there if anyone does happen to be interested. Of course, publishing a blog turned out to be much more time and energy consuming than I expected. Today, not only is it patchy and unfinished, but I’ve barely arrived at the heart of the narrative, the meaty centre. And I do itch to at least reach the meat of it, if not a conclusion (ideally the practice is ever ongoing)!

Perhaps this new version of the project, my Substack refresh, will be just as difficult to sustain, but I’m looking for a new ‘in’ as I return after time away on maternity leave. I am hoping that a new structure or focus or SOMETHING will help me find new momentum or even decide if I believe it really is worth pursuing any further.

A couple of other things of note:

1)     The space, time and money to practice and make dance are extremely limited resources (for reasons we don't have time to get into here) and so to maintain a dance practice it's pretty essential to have additional creative inputs and outlets. How else do we stay connected, even interested, in something so embodied while away from the studio for any number or reasons (like working a day job)?

2)     This lack of resources is due in large part to a lack of audience, interest and understanding of dance, even within the art-going community. I'd like to do this not only to document my own work, but to hopefully start a discourse about dance. To continue the rich conversations that begin in studios and theatre foyers, cafes and wine bars. To connect!

So, I find myself turning more towards writing, and logically, I would write about dance; despite my earlier declaration of my ambivalence towards the genre (sub-genre? niche?), dance is my creative centre. I have often heard established artists speak of creating in order to discover what it is they are creating, to learn what it is they have to say. Of not needing to know before they begin. Now I would not call myself a writer the way I would call myself a dancer, but writing has been a part of my dance practice for some time. This is me sitting to write about dance for the sake of practice, but also to discover where I find value in dance writing.

Lately, I have found Substack to be an unexpected, ever-flowing source of small delights. I confess I do still spend more hours consuming podcasts and YouTube videos for fun than reading Substacks, but opening the app on the occasional, quiet moment has felt comforting, wholesome and inspiring. Most of the writers I follow have their something bigger - published books, poetry, articles, or indeed podcasts and YouTube channels – but the sharing of their creative projects through this platform has been a gentle spark for me to keep that fire burning during creative ebbs: when there is no funding, no space, when there are injuries, or indeed, as my gradual emergence from maternity leave has made it difficult to get to the studio or the theatre.

This is where I'll start afresh. It may not be where I continue, and it will almost definitely be irregular or even sporadic, but here it is.