Decolonising time - discovering a new relationship with time.
“Through the research based on sharing and exchange, we are doing dramaturgical thinking that is a blueprint for the new working methodologies within dance and body-based practices. These methodologies nurture and liberate the creative process, by finding tender ways of making work whilst embodying time.” — Collaborative statement (Gerrie, Stella, Ira)
Recipient of Critical Path - 2023 Regional NSW Choreographic Research Fellowship. Collaborating with Ira Ferris and Stella Chen.
Geraldine explores what shifts/transformations in the individual and social body could occur if we decolonise time and slow down. Geraldine uses the ‘pause’ of raising a child and of Covid, to launch (slowly) & question working practices and the impact that these have on the art that we make.
— Claire Hicks. Previous Director of Critical Path
How the fellowship arrived.
January 2023. I am breathing, living, making, and birthing a new me on Bundjalung Country, the land that has held and nestled me and my family since 2017. At the birth of my child in August 2019, TIME stopped and my transition into a new being struck. In July 2022 (when writing the fellowship application), I reached my three-year anniversary on Pause. A pause in my performing and choreographic practice – while simultaneously practising how to navigate the suspension of time.
I have come to nurture TIME.
To appreciate being in it.
Throughout the fellowship, I wish to explore what this new relationship to TIME offers my arts practice and the way I make work. The research fellowship will take a duration of 1-year; giving me the support to re-imagine how I can create work with a new sense of time.
Throughout the fellowship, I will collaborate with Ira Ferris and Stella Chen.
Meeting Ira in Lou Cope’s Doing Dramaturgy - Dance 2022 course gave me a new experience in being an artist. Ira reflected my practice and brevity back to me through her nurtured questioning on practice and process. The fellowship will give us the opportunity to continue to build our creative working relationship, informing our research and common interest on time, keeping accountability, questioning and reflection through the research.
I invited Stella Chen as a new parent, to share practice and exchange through dance. We will speak about our experience with time in making performance, how we perceive time in our bodies and dance as an embodied response to our conversations. I am interested in sharing with Stella as her work is deeply embodied from her research on deep time, post-memory and lived experiences.
