Getting ready to head south to Dunedin

One week before I head to Dunedin to start the Caroline Plummer Fellowship I feel like I'm on the cusp of a new adventure.  I want to create a site specific performance from the perspective of people with visual impairment.  I have a disability myself but it's a mobility impairment rather than a visual impairment so it is completely new territory in many ways.  It's strange to have that sense of launching into a world that is not my own direct experience.  I'm aware of not wanting to be the coloniser and being sensitive to this community.  I also know I'm not always going to get it right, as much as I try!

Every person, without fail, I have told that I'm going to Dunedin, warns me Im going to freeze. I am undaunted by the climate challenge.  Having once lived in Canada and experienced -35, Dunedin should be a walk in the park!

The site specific performance will be set up in a house, or building with many rooms.  Each room will house a memory - a memory from a person who happens to have a visual impairment.  It may touch on elements of their visual experience or not but there will be some relationship, intrinsically.  The room will be a creative response to that memory and could involve many different approaches - it could be a dance, an installation, a recording, a film, a musical score or a collection of photographs, or a combination of these things.  Each memory will have a theme.

Finding people to participate is the first main hurdle.  I don't need people to be artists or dancers, just people who are willing to share their experiences.  I want to capture something of their unique perception of the world, in a way that is exciting and satisfying for them.  I also want it to be engaging for an audience, not just visually (or perhaps not visually at all) but kinesthetically.  I'm aware of  how 'fully sighted culture' is vision based and how this seems to dominate artistic responses.  I want to move away from that and engage all our senses: seeing, hearing , smelling, tasting and touching. It will be interesting to see what this opens up.

I have a few contacts in Dunedin but it won't be until I get there that I can really begin getting to know people and creating a community.

The concept of community is interesting to me.  What does it mean and represent beyond the obvious? What constitutes a community?  How is it built? What sustains it and what are qualities of a cohesive community? It will be interesting to have some dialogue around this.