IN RESIDENCE from March 8th - 31st, 2010

with:
Noha Ramadan (choreographer)
Jennifer Mills (poet/novelist)
Eliisa Erävalo (performer/dancer)


Australian artists choreographer (Noha Ramadan) and poet and novelist (Jennifer Mills) will be exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of collaborating across disparate artistic practices.

"What are the physicality and the physics of structure, the voice of the dancer, and the body of the text? Where do our conceptions of specificity, meaning, co-ordination, breath, rhythm, story and movement intersect? What are our concerns, problems, and challenges in working together?

We are not collaborating in the conventional sense. We want to make sense out of our collaboration. Perhaps there can be no agreement between these art forms. We are interested in the dialogue, in becoming lost in the vague and confusing spaces between the formal elements of our work.

Rather than focus on reading and writing as metaphorical descriptions of our relationship to the body we want to find a place of co-habitation, a research terrain which lies beyond the borders of each of our maps. Taking ideas of vagueness and ambiguity as touchstones, we want to get lost somewhere in the Terra Incognita of movement/words, looking for that which is not writing and that which is not dancing or choreographic, and which is all of these artistic intelligences and beyond them."


Noha Ramadan studied Music and Political Economy in Sydney before attending the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam where she graduated in 2009. Her practice and attention wavers non-routinely between movement, music, performance and ‘fauxlosophy’. Her primary artistic and personal questions concern the nature and necessity of live performance/ embodiment. Since 2008 she has performed in the thrash disco-propaganda punk outfit, Knoetaroet, and the political satire cabaret, Land of Anarchia.
Jennifer Mills is the author of the novel, The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth (PressPress, 2009). Her writing has appeared in many Australian journals and collections, including Best Australian Stories 2007 and Award Winning Australian Writing 2009. She also blogs and makes regular contributions to New Matilda.com and Overland.org.