Revealing and Reckoning: Curating Place-Responsive Performance on Country

Abstract

From engaging in a practice of site-specific performance, the author has in recent years also branched into curating place-responsive performance events. This expansion of Taylor’s practice has grown out of her seeking to represent more about the place than is possible to draw out in her own work, because places are inherently multi-layered, experienced through many different bodies and perspectives, and are continually being reconstrued by the people who inhabit them. To represent to some extent this multiplicity, Taylor invites diverse artists to respond to the site or place, which in Australia is always situated on Country.

Country is the way Australia’s First Nations people conceive of land, sea and sky. It is only in recent years that Australians have collectively begun to conceive of a sense of place that is based upon Indigenous presence and culture. As a nation, Australia is still absorbing this reality, following two centuries of denial based on the British settler-colonial fallacy of terra nullius – the premise of an “empty land” upon which invasion was justified. Such paradigm altering requires much reckoning with place. This paper proposes that live site-responsive performance events might contribute to this reckoning.

Drawing upon the author’s curatorial projects in Victoria, Australia, this paper discusses the effects of foregrounding relationships between place, body and identity in performance events on Country. Through their varied responses, curated artists bring audiences/participants’ attention to sensory, historical, environmental and cultural qualities of the place. Through the haptic, kinaesthetic and conceptual engagement that the artists invite, audiences become more conscious of their individual and collective embodied presence in the place. Bringing together First Nations custodians, diverse contemporary artists and community groups, these curated events offer approaches to understanding and fostering a sense of place that is tangibly felt by the audience/participants.