Dance Literacy
Concept
Shared online home dancing is something beautiful emerging from early lockdown periods. Sharing dances arcs back to other traditional ways of communicating.
In this work people can share dance moves. It will be shared in a few forms, a site, social media platforms, video screens facing public outdoor spaces and live sessions. Sharing and collecting movements as units in a language and an archive of movements with defined meanings and personal or wider cultural history attached to the movement is explained. This is like a community pantry of dance - dance pantry for people to visit, add what they wish and take what they wish.
Audience
Outdoor screen audience: the general public passing through outdoor area with screen.
Online audience can be engaged through various online social media platforms.
Dance Sessions are with interested audiences attending in the flesh through an event.
Space
Videos can be shown outside or as filler video on screens running in the background, when other events or other feature videos are not on. Preferably with a decent amount of space near screens so that if people want to watch and learn some moves nearby they can,
Development and Installation
SUBMISSION
People are filmed around Sydney and encouraged to submit a dance move. These dance moves can be personal historical cultural moves, a move from our political history, forgotten Sydney goth club dance moves (from or weird uncle Derrick moves. The "movement" submitted can loosely become a "dance move" but does not have to be officially a dance move to begin with. By submitting a "move" it becomes a dance move for people to use in future. Like building up movements in a sign language, each dance move has a history and meaning relative to the person individually and/or the culture at large which can be looked up in this project, from the personal, completely private familial, to a ridiculous and innocuous to a significant gesture found our shared political history.
SCREENINGS
The dance moves can be shown on screens in the city, between events in dormant time before and after things.
EVENTS. A choreographer is hired to learn these dance moves and create a few sequences to instruct others on using them. I will work with the choreographer in delivering the dance session and figure out costume and other performative presentation methods tested. It will be bright colourful and embrace Sydney activewear styles, Mardigras, corporate Sydney aesthetics.
Benefits
- Community connections.
- Community sharing.
- Fun events.
- Works easily within festival events or outdoor events.
- Can be filler background video running between other things.
- Growing work.
- Sharing of personal and cultural histories.
Challenges
Making people comfortable to learn new dances in public spaces.
Covid Accomodations
- Online content and online sharing on a number of social media platforms.