live and online dance intimacy
Digital choreographic residency with Critical Path
Michelle St Anne’s practice interrogates collaboration and devising to re-write bodily and societal scripts. Her work exists at the intersection of social justice and artistic practice, drawing on the rich traditions in western and south Asian cannons to reveal the underlying experiences and dynamics of power, gender, space/site and expression.
The Living Room Theatre’s work is driven by proximity, that shatters the façade and blurs the line between viewer and performer.
In her research Michelle St Anne will explore questions about the philosophies of her practice and what new possibilities can be discovered when you bleed digital and online platforms through choreographic approaches.
Through the provocation of proximity, and lens as metaphor and reality Michelle will explore:
- What are the possibilities of the three viewing “bodies”? How does a choreographic approach merge the worlds? What new visual timbres and rhythms emerge?
- How do these discoveries challenge experience.
- To question the filming of live performance and how live and online worlds can co-exist each with their unique environments using choreographically approaches. The dance between the worlds.
Michelle is working with collaborator Imogen Cranna, supported by digital mentor Linda Dement.
Special thanks to Eileen Camilleri & Ryuichi Fujimura
Michelle St Anne is a site-responsive choreographic artist whose immersive and intimate performances create unique audience experiences. Her work is deeply symbolic, responding to site-specific architectures, audience movement, and embodied participation through lighting, smell, sound, and temperature shifting the way audiences perceive critical issues of our time. She is the co-founder and artistic director of The Living Room Theatre where she has created, directed, and performed in 26 original works.
Imogen Cranna is a cross disciplinary artist who graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance in 2007 with a National Diploma in Dance Performance. She returned to Sydney in 2008 and has performed in both her own projects and works of professional choreographers in various independent dance platforms, working with icons such as Kay Armstrong, Tess de Quincey, Vicki Van Hout, and Tony Osborne. She has been a key collaborator of Michelle St Anne’s for ten years.
Linda Dement (Mentor) has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-sexual corporeality and the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted.
Critical Path is Australia’s leading centre for choreographic enquiry, research and development.
Critical Path was established in 2005 to fill a recognised gap in the independent dance sector in NSW – providing a ‘critical’ pathway through which professional dance-makers could innovate their choreographic practice. Fifteen years on, Critical Path stands proud as a unique and significant contributor to the development of contemporary choreography in Australia.
Monday 14 November - Friday 25 November 2022
Critical Path Drill Hall, Darling Point
