Gretel Taylor
BODYWEATHER WORKSHOP: THE ESTUARY
23 March, 2–5pm
Erskine River estuary, Gadubanud Country, Lorne, Victoria
Meet at Erskine River Swing Bridge picnic area
Gretel Taylor will facilitate a place-responsive movement workshop introducing sensory activities derived from Body Weather. Body Weather investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities, but as constantly changing - just like the weather. The term and philosophical basis for Body Weather was founded in the early 1980s in Japan by dancer Min Tanaka and further developed by proponents worldwide.
On beautiful Gadubanud Country in Lorne, we will observe and move with the varied qualities of sites around the estuary, generating improvised embodied responses. This workshop is suited to artists and anyone interested in exploring the body, physical presence and relationships to place.
Gretel Taylor is a dancer, artist, curator and researcher. Her site-responsive performance and video works often interrogate settler-colonial presence on unceded Aboriginal Country, and colonisation's relatedness to ecocide. Her improvised dance practice of 'locating' enacts a kinaesthetic empathy with place. Gretel is lead artist/curator of BodyPlaceProject, a key artist of Environmental Performance Authority (EPA), and collaborates regularly with photographer-filmmaker Laki Sideris.
Gretel Taylor trained at the Body Weather Farm in Japan in 1999 and 2000, which informed her performance, teaching and research. She has taught Dance and Performance at Deakin, RMIT, Monash and Victoria University, as well as regularly at Dancehouse. www.bodyplaceproject.com
This project was made possible by the Australian Government Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia, and Regional Arts Victoria.
Image: Gretel Taylor, Scourge 2019. Photo Laki Sideris.
