Dance Territories

The Melbourne Festival brings together artists of all kinds in all genres. Indigenous Australian artist Sarah-Jane Norman, in collaboration with Algerian-French choreographer Nacera Belaza, bring the audience Dance Territories, a performance and installation where the pair press and question the boundaries between body and place in relation to the political and the personal implications of migration, dislocation, circulation and invasion. We spoke to Sarah-Jane Norman about their show being performed at the festival.

Tell me a bit about The River’s Children and Take This, For It Is My Body?
The River’s Children, Take This, For It Is My Body and Heirloom (the third work which is also featured in Dance Territories, which is a sculpture) are all part of a body of work called Unsettling Suite, which was made between 2009 and 2013. Unsettling Suite was a series of works spanning media – from performance to sculpture, to video and sound- in which I sought to investigate coloniality, as an embodied phenomenon.

I took the construct of the domestic house – with all it’s connotations of comfort, intimacy, and ordinariness – and used it as a construct to explore the ways in which “ordinary” life is underwritten by echoes of generational trauma and violence for the living descendants of genocide. I grew up in a country town, which cashed big time on peddling a lace doily view of Australian colonial heritage, in which the brutality of the settler history was overwritten by pseudo-Victorian country quaintness. This is the sort of thing which probably seems quite harmless and charming to a lot of Australians who are happy to spend a weekend taking Devonshire tea at a stately homestead without giving much thought to how many Aboriginal people might have been dispossessed or killed by the pastoralist who built it, not to mention the extent to which the living descendants of that clan continue to be affected.

We carry the weight of this violence in the depths of our beings – diving in and attempting some understanding of how that grief is lived on a daily basis – through the body – is part of a bigger personal and political process, which I aim to engage through my work, and I invite audiences to join me in that.

What inspired you to work on these pieces and Dance Territories?
I made The River’s Children back in 2013 Performance Space in Sydney and Take This, For It Is My Body was made in 2010 for In Between Time in Bristol, UK. So both of these pieces are remounts of existing works which have never been seen in Melbourne before.

How long have you been working on these particular works?
The idea for Take This was seeded more than ten years ago, and it took maybe four more years of thinking and tinkering and experimentation before it came together. I still change it slightly every time I perform it – it’s still perfecting itself, in a way I don’t even consider it finished, even though I’ve been touring it since 2010 and it’s been performed in three countries.

The River’s Children was one of those rare cases that arrived as a bolt from the blue – I was on a residency in rural Portugal in 2011 and I took an afternoon nap, and in the space between sleeping and waking the whole piece just arrived in my mind. I had been staying near a river and washing my clothes in river water every day. I first performed it in Sydney in 2013 and it has been changed a bit for Dancehouse as the space is quite different.

Did you face any challenges with these pieces?
Performing live work is always challenging, even for seasoned artists. This is particularly true when you are an independent artist making mostly solo work. As an ensemble performer, you rehearse your butt off for six weeks and then you do the show- but all you usually have to worry about is preparing for and doing the performance. The burnout is real.

It can also be a real challenge performing work about content, which is deeply psychologically complex and difficult. I suppose it’s kind of an understatement to say that I go to some dark places with my work – I have made a career out of pushing my limits, either through physical duress or very long durations – not because I’m a exhibitionist masochist (quite the opposite), but because I’m interested in limits and boundaries and what happens psychically when you cross them, and attempt bring an audience along with you.

This is all well and good when you’re in performance, it can be totally exhilarating and transformative – but when you go home alone to your hotel room when you have just spent 12 hours eviscerating yourself live on stage… this can be very lonely and hard to integrate. I live with multiple chronic illnesses as well, so my work is getting harder and harder for me to physically perform. There is nothing glamourous about making art or touring it. It’s gruelling, underpaid and precarious work with the occasional burst of awesome. It’s not an easy way to make a living. Performing is the easy part, the challenges are mostly off-stage.

How does Dance Territories differ to other shows you have worked in?
Well, it’s the first time I have been on a bill, which is explicitly and exclusively a Dance Program. My background includes dance training, in fact my years training as a Butoh dancer in Australia and Japan were formative in terms of the development of my practice. And my work as a body based live artist has always been much more closely aligned with dance than to theatre or visual arts. But nonetheless, I do not personally identify my work as dance, nor would a lot of people I imagine, so including a work like mine in the Dance Territories program is an interesting provocation.

What do you expect to be working on after Dance Territories?
My wife and I will be disappearing into the bush for a while to be with the spirits and plan for the apocalypse. I mostly live in Berlin, I have had a base there for 8 years, but that city has been so aggressively gentrified in the time I’ve been there, its becoming too hard to survive. So in the immediate future will mainly be working on finding myself a new home, which will in all likelihood be somewhere far from the city. I’ve made 8 new solo performance works in the past 4 years which is way above a reasonable rate of production, so I’ll be taking a bit of research and development time.

I’ll be returning to long neglected writing projects: I’m working on the completion of two books of fiction, and am also currently editing a collection of essays on Indigenous Australian performance and hybrid art practice. I starred in a film based on one of my short stories, shot in Berlin early this year and directed and written by my collaborator Sam Icklow, which is currently in post-production and will be premiering at Sundance. I’ll be working in various ways on the development of other artist’s projects. I’m developing film projects for down the track, as well as sound projects, and also developing my practice as a metalsmith, as soon as I’m in one place long enough to set up a studio.

Dance Territories
Dance House, 150 Princes Street, Carlton North
Friday October 14 – Sunday October 16, 7pm
festival.melbourne/2016/events/dance-territories