WHY I DANCE IN FLIGHT and /or IN WATER?
Perhaps it’s the fact that it feels very much like one is practising contact improvisation dance with a harness and the same feeling applies to the sensation of dancing in water, it feels like she, ( the water), is pushing you, with her weight, into new places.
Or that they both feel like flying...but on different planets.
These are also both practices that are very conducive to interacting with projections and with light.
Using projections of my underwater dance and whales doing the same. These can be thrown onto the walls, bodies and giant mirrors of the IACC, (making it seems like the whole room is underwater), where we as dancers carry out harness dance explorations.
Collaborators
Tomasz Madajczak
Film artist and multimedia maker. I have worked with him last year in our residencies at Uillinn West Cork Arts centre. In those many weeks we created so many artistic seedlings of ideas that we wish to develop on now. As part of our forward trajectory in our work.
Perhaps it’s the fact that it feels very much like one is practising contact improvisation dance with a harness and the same feeling applies to the sensation of dancing in water, it feels like she, ( the water), is pushing you, with her weight, into new places.
Or that they both feel like flying...but on different planets.
These are also both practices that are very conducive to interacting with projections and with light.
Using projections of my underwater dance and whales doing the same. These can be thrown onto the walls, bodies and giant mirrors of the IACC, (making it seems like the whole room is underwater), where we as dancers carry out harness dance explorations.
Collaborators
Tomasz Madajczak
Film artist and multimedia maker. I have worked with him last year in our residencies at Uillinn West Cork Arts centre. In those many weeks we created so many artistic seedlings of ideas that we wish to develop on now. As part of our forward trajectory in our work.
Hugh Stanier + Lucia Smyth
Artists chosen to work with us are hybrid makers, who work as circus AND dance artists and even in water.
Both of them already do.
They crucially have very organic dancey acrobatic style and even more so a lifelong and ongoing practice of contact improvisation.
Sometimes even in water. This applies to Hugh Stanier and Lucia Smyth.
Lucia even has also taught freediving in the past herself and has worked with myself and Tomasz before in experimentations.
Above see a moment of contact improvisation between Hugh Stanier, my collaborator and co teacher Vega Luukkonen.
Partnerships
Funding in kind with support and discounts from
- The Irish Aerial creation centre in Limerick with hugely discounted creation space, rigging support.
- Offering them a workshops for local / national aerialists in very unique bungee dance harnesses.
- Plus a showing of the discoveries made by myself and Tomasz Madajczak during the residencies and underwater explorations.
- ACCOMMODATION in Limerick near the IACC, is further funded in kind by friends giving us their spare cottage for two weeks. Lucky us.
- OCEAN SHOOT in Situ producer - Famara Prado - a local creative producer who has offered herself for free. I have worked with Famara in th past as collaborating acrobats in Barcelona and in Perth. She is from Tenerife and has since an almost career ending injury during the pandemic, like myself, she became a freediver. And a producer. She understands that the bursary is very limited and I can only afford a pair of dancers for now, but she is supporting the project with her local knowledge, car, accommodation locations and amazing filming locations scouting. I did a reckon mission of the area with her and it's optimal for our needs.
Mentor
Tomasz Madajczak has begun explaining how light and lenses and cameras can be a creative expression of dynamic choreography or sorts. In my dance film mentorships and courses, I learned that editing is a from of choreography i itself and cinematography, of course is in a sense like scenography.
I wish to really know, understand and be able to stretch and play within my photographic and film apparatus, old and new. Tomasz has a way of patiently explaining the physics of light, and how lenses work, that actually reaches me and stays! I wish to pay him for his patience and brilliant approach.
Discussions / Interviewees:
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs - Confirmed : Author of Undrowned: BLACK FEMINIST LESSONS from MARINE MAMMALS.
- Dr Nan Hauser - Confirmed: President & Director of the Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation Marine biologist in the Cook islands, whose life was saved by a humpback whale.
- Tyson Yunkapota - Confirmed: Author of SAND TALK: How indigenous thinking can save the world.
- Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi - Confirmed: a Torres Strait Islander and Tongan storyteller whose writing work focuses on poetry and climate change.
- Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare - Confirmed: Authors of Survival of the Friendliest.
- Paul Watson - Confirmed: Co - Founder of Greenpeace and founder of Sea Shepherd who's entire life was changed by the altruism of a whale.
- Katie Payne - Confirmed: First to recognise the whale sounds were actual song/ music and co producer of Songs of the Humpback Whale 1970.
- Tentative and delicate research is ongoing to establish exactly what sharing of which knowledge, from a long list of indigenous elders approached is appropriate, (from Ireland, Australia, Tonga and North America), knowledge like this is often sacred and protected and I take this very seriously.
Cultural knowledge such a this, is protected, should and will be approached with endless care and respect and even guidance from the communities it originates from.
E.G.: Guidelines dealing with the correct management of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander's (ATSI) Creative Intellectual property, like the ones written by the Australia Council for the Arts, will be considered and improved upon. As well as any other relevant and helpful sources.
First nations advisers, guidance from within and around traditional custodians of such knowledge, will be consulted every step of the way and when budgets are larger, or where the future feature film is concerned, multiple paid roles for First nations artists and advisers will be centralised to the filmmaking, the creative processes, leadership and structures in places within these, including constant review and improvements, to ensure safety for all marginalised, BIPOC and ATSI participants as they work and create.
3 main locations
1) My home office - For reflection, reading research and interviews with seeders and tenders of the nursery of further ideas on this research, whales and me and the mergers of dance in flight and in water.
2) The ocean - for underwater dance filming. Film from underwater during this research. *See notes on location choice below.
3) The Irish Aerial Creation Centre - IACC - for bungee dance physical research, projections of ocean work, workshops and sharing/showings.
*Reasons for strategically working in warmer, clearer, calmer and deeper water in the ocean.
1) We need depth. More than five metres to film what we need to shoot. Which does not exist in a pool in Ireland. I know this because the previous research I carried out with my underwater dance practice.
2) We need some heat in the water.
When I was training for my international SEA SURVIVAL AND RESCUE certs last Summer, ( as part of the STCW'95 at the National maritime College of Ireland), I learned that the rule of thumb is if the water is 20 degrees, you have 20 mins until you start hypothermia, if it's 10 degrees you have tens mins, 5 is 5 mins, and so on.
Yes working with wet suits helps some, but because of the freediving phenomenon known as the mammalian diving reflex: Our blood leaves the superficial areas of flesh and goes to organs when we hold our breath in water.
This makes us get very cold, very fast.
That's why freedivers even wear wetsuits in higher than 30 degree temp waters.
So even in the warmest oceans and or pools, we don't get to last very long. But Irish waters, even at their warmest, are simply not an option to work for longer than 20 to max 40 minutes per day. For research and filming, it simply just isn't enough.
3) We need calm oceans so we can get out to sea as often as possible in the designated, budgeted and scheduled time of research and contracted artist payment weeks. In Ireland unfortunately, 7 or even 8 out of 10 trips to sea are cancelled due to bad weather. Believe me I spent two seasons on whale encounter eco tour boats, in West Cork, during the pandemic. As well as getting my international powerboat licence for up to 24 metre crafts, my, attempting to do freediving courses in Ireland and my sailing courses, the trips are more often cancelled than not.
It's just not feasible on our budget to have such a high cancellation rate due to unpredictable weather.
4) Visibility is a huge factor when filming underwater. Ireland has often challenging weather, the temperatures, choppiness and to be fair a vibrant Atlantic oceanic flora. All this making it difficult to see underwater as far as we need to to capture more than one body in a film frame underwater.
Tenerife island has ideal temperatures, brilliant weather, 20 metre plus average visibility for filming underwater , calm ocean sections, with easily accessible depths, reachable without a boat, (cheaper again.)
This long list of reasons plus the fact that I have travelled there to test the water for exactly this, last year. And have a local volunteering creative producer, ex -acrobat, current freediver offering herself to support our project. An old friend from is from there, is based there and has scoped out a slew of production details for us. Her name is Famara Prado and I have worked with her before. She is amazing.
All these reasons make it the perfect, optimum filming location for the shots we need, at the depths we need for the lengths of time we need. And it's in Europe.
2 Raw unedited clips of recent explorations in my bespoke bungee dance Harness - 2023