on inclusion
L’Optimisme.
This essay on the life of dancer Jane Avril touches on the history of the asylum and the treatment of neurological disorders in the late C19th.
Download article HERE: CSIRO-L’OPTIMISME
Summary:
Jane Avril was incarcerated in Saltpetriere asylum as a teenager because of a movement disorder that she later claimed was ‘cured by dancing’. She became one of the favoured dancers at the Moulin Rouge, and a good friend, supporter and muse to Toulouse-Lautrec. Her physical oddness was celebrated by poets and artists of the period. Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions were of a woman whose dance was irregular and a little uncontrolled. This essay touches on the way both art and science can understand and document—perhaps even heal—the human condition, but via very different means.
L’Optimisme was a performance-presentation for DANscienCE Week, CSIRO Discovery Lecture Theatre, August 10, 2013. Its first version was a cabaret-biography, created for the National Gallery of Australia ‘City of Lights’ Promenade, March 2013.
Singing the landscape electric [SOP] a poetic dialogue on feeling one’s self in the world.
Originally written for “Sense of Place: Canberra” , a postgraduate seminar held at UWS Sydney School of Social Ecology, 2001.
The Eye of the Maker–feeling into counter-memory
INCLUSIVE DANCE
Performance alchemies: Igneous’ Mirage, Suzon Fuks, James Cunningham.
Australian Choreographic Centre, Nov 16-18, 2006
RT 77 Feb-March 2007
Not about disability: Britain’s CanDo Co.
The Gasworks, Melbourne Fringe, October 7.
RT 22, Dec-Jan 1997