New dates for July 2 & 3

Rehearsals are well underway now and we have set new dates for the performances on July 2 & 3 to coincide with the Tertiary Dance Festival.

Here is a little blurb I have written for my press release:

House of Memories is a kinaesthetic, aural and visual performance directed by this year’s Caroline Plummer Dance Fellow, Suzanne Cowan. Audiences will experience a sensory journey through a series of vignettes representing the unique world of people with visual impairments.  The performances will run on the 2^nd and 3^rd of July at 551 Castle St as part of the Tertiary Dance Festival at Otago University.

Visitors to the Castle St villa will be led through seven performance installations,  to experience a slice of the performers’ lives:  the high speed technological sound equipment of a blind man  juxtaposed with a graceful duet derived from guiding techniques; a woman’s passion for wool-handling explored as a gestural solo and the precious memories of a man’s ballroom dancing days brought to life with a live band. The audience will also experience a maze navigated entirely through sound and texture.

Each room’s intimate story is an expression of home and told through a variety of mediums including voice and sound recordings, dance, photography and film.

House of Memories is the culmination of Cowan’s fellowship project for 2010. The Fellowship, hosted by the Physed Department at Otago University, focuses on community dance and developing awareness of cultural diversity. As a dancer/choreographer , Cowan has worked in mixed ability dance both nationally and internationally for the past ten years.  In 2008 she was the recipient of the Art Award and Supreme Award for the NZ Attitude Awards for people with disabilities.  Her most recent piece for the mixed ability , Touch Compass Dance Company , ‘Grotteschi’ (2008) was described by Auckland dance reviewer, Bernadette Rae, as winning her “My Most Memorable Work of the Year prize”.

Bookings are essential for House of Memories as audiences are limited to fifteen people per showing. On both Friday and Saturday night there will be showings at 7, 8, and 9pm.  Bookings can be made via email.  Contact suzanne.cowan@otago.co.nz. 

Location Location Location!

The great news this week is that at last we have the go ahead on a university house for the 'House of Memories' project.  Thanks to Otago Uni property services we have the use of a lovely old villa with seven rooms.  It's on the university campus in Castle St and about five minutes from my office in the Phys ed department.  Each room in the house will have its own performance installation ranging from dance to video, music and voice recordings and photography. Almost all of the performers and contributors, including sound composition, will be by people with sight impairments.  The piece reflects their stories and their relationship with an idea of home, as both a physical place and a place in the heart.  It raises questions about how we create a place of ease in our lives, a place where we feel we are in our element.  For some people in the house it's an activity where they feel they are at their best and most liberated.  Technology too, plays an important part, as for one man it is his aural connection to the world via a cacophony of technology, where he makes his mark.

One room will be set aside as a maze which visitors have to negotiate without their sight, via sound and textural cues.  This will be interesting!

At this stage the performance will be held over two nights, tentatively June 25 and June 27.  A Friday night and a Sunday night (June 26 is Midwinter carnival in Dunedin which I don't want to clash with).  This is just before the 2010 Dance Symposium on interdisciplinary practice begins.  Entry will be by booking only because space in the rooms is limited and I want to create a sense of intimacy, playing with boundaries between spectator and performer.  Three of the rooms will have some degree of participation from the audience (including the maze) which should make it more fun and interactive. I am hoping to have three shows a night, each with fifteen guests, who will be rotated around the rooms, three at a time.  It is a lot of work for the performers but I think they are up for it and we can manage it so it's not too arduous.  Only five of the rooms will be active at any one time so some performers will get a rest in between a showing.  Have to say, it took a while for me to get my head round this - we will have to try it out.  Choreographing an audience is never an easy thing.

This week I met with Marty Roberts from the Theatre Department at the uni and he has agreed to help with lighting and some of the theatrical considerations. Yay! He's an excellent lighting designer.

Next week I hope to hold our first production meeting, all going well and create a timeline.  There's a lot to do but rehearsals are underway.

A Show Without Sight


Yesterday I went to quite an extraordinary show at the Allen Hall theatre at the uni.  It was put on by the theatre studies students and before you even entered the theatre you were blindfolded and led to a seat.  As I was one of the first I waited for about 10 minutes before everyone was seated.  It was quite a scary experience to have my sight taken away.  Immediately I felt vulnerable and concerned about my safety.  I had no sense of where I was in the room even though I had been to that theatre before. I had an overwhelming desire to peak but I resisted and was determined to stick it out.  When the performance started there was a series of noises, loud and soft, near and far, interspersed with voices.  The voices were very theatrical and rhythmical building to a crescendo and then dropping away.  I was aware of many voices, male and female.  The rhythm seemed more important than the content which I often couldn't make much sense of anyway. Every now and again different smells were released into the audience.  One smelt like a woody kind of incense, another a very gentle perfume.

What was really interesting to me was my relationship between my inner world and outer world shifted dramatically.  I almost felt like I was in a dream and occasionally felt quite sleepy.  I was more aware of my body and how I was feeling than I normally am and generally felt more internally orientated and less externally orientated.  It was like a dream with no visuals.  Gradually I relaxed around my feelings of heightened vulnerability and let myself just enjoy the passing show.  At the end when we were told to remove our blindfolds I was both relieved and surprised to discover a room of about 40 people seated on cushions around me.  I felt like I had journeyed in another world.  Food for thought...  

Meeting the visually impaired community

I have been in Dunedin just over a month and in that time have met and interviewed about twenty people who are either completely blind or visually impaired.  It has been a fascinating journey of discovery and I'm very grateful to those people for being so open and generous about their lives.  Some of these people have been blind or sight impaired from birth whereas others are in a more liminal space where their sight is gradually deteriorating.  One man became completely blind from an accident and another woman has lost her peripheral vision from a brain injury caused by an accident.  The ages range from early twenties to 70 so far.

Rather than being interested in their sight impairments from a diagnostic perspective I am more interested in them as people and how their visual condition shapes their experiences and outlook on the world.  To say it is a 'loss' supports the assumption that to be fully sighted is the norm and also the ideal.  Such a mainstream assumption also reflects the idea that there is a perfect body and physical and mental deviations are defined according to that standard.  It privileges a very narrow range of experience and this is something that perhaps this project could address. As one visually impaired friend said "You see what you see" regardless of other's experience.

Speaking to this group of people it is clear that they are incredibly adaptable and creative as they negotiate a world designed for fully sighted people.  They live productive lives, have jobs and families although some people mentioned difficulties in been taken seriously by employers. Some expressed a sense of vulnerability  as their degree of sight lessened.  One person, who was blind from birth, mentioned she was uncomfortable with people looking at her when she was unable to see them.

It could be interesting to question the 'certainty' fully sighted people feel about what they see.  In 1990, French philosopher, Derrida, curated an exhibition of drawings and paintings for the Louvre called,Les Memoires d'Aveugles, (Memories of the Blind), where he examined the blinding effect of reflection, the reflection which dazzles and petrifies.  He argued  that the artist is blind, the object of attention always invisible, only invoked by memory.  He said that he, as artist, cannot see what memory makes him blind to and this blindness becomes the frame for the art.  What I think he was getting at (and I could be completely wrong about this) is what contextualises the image or subject, i.e the frame, is invisible.  And it is the frame that constructs the meaning of the subject.  He was refering to his own blindness, metaphorical and literal.

So how can all this philosophising be applied to my project? What relevance does it have? Well perhaps it is possible to draw attention to the idea that, rather than blindness, the absence of seeing, we all interpret the world (sighted or unsighted) through a series of filters, a unique perspective made up of our own experiences and associations with our environment.  We see what we see - and this is often layer upon layer of unquestioned assumptions and responses.  Sight impairment requires a level of engagement with the world that is more defined by the senses of touch and sound.  Helen Keller once made a remark that sighted people miss so much because they don't have the same kinaesthetic direct contact with the world as blind people.

My intention is that the House of Memories, will focus on the aural and kinasethetic, revealing aspects that may not otherwise be 'seen' or experienced.

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.