Adapted from a presentation to MCA staff:

In 2016, I travelled to Sydney to experience a work of William Forsythe’s titled ‘Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time’, a quote from the blind French resistance fighter Jacques Lusseyran. I knew that Forsythe had explained his choreographic objects theory with reference to writings on perception by Lusseyran and also Bernard Morin, a blind French mathematician. But though Forsythe takes advantage of blindness in conceiving of his choreographic objects theory, his installations are relentlessly inaccessible to blind and low vision audiences. A prime example was Forsythe’s Sydney biennale work with its swinging field of pendulums, which would be chaos to encounter with a mobility cane.

In the wake of my disappointment with the inaccessibility of Forsythe’s work, I started to wonder how the idea of choreographic objects might be reimagined through blindness, in ways that more radically expand access and welcome to audiences.

My first experiment was to motion capture the mobility cane of my friend and collaborator Andy Slater, founder of SoVISA, the Society of Visually impaired Sound Artists, as he walked back and forth across a room. I thought it would result in a Richard Serra-like zig zag across the landscape, but even this simple cane navigation - just walking back and forth - yielded a far more complex path of sweeping arcs and undulations. My original pitch for the Bella Room commission was to build on this test, by motion capturing mobility devices during a duet between two Sydney dancers, Alex Craig and Riana Head-Toussaint, with sensors placed along Holly’s mobility cane, and on one rim of Riana’s wheelchair.

I had planned that the dancers would improvise to a track by blind Chicago-based percussionist Tommy Carroll, who had given me advance access to his album ‘Dances for Different Bodies’. The track I chose for Alex and Riana to improvise to is titled ‘Dingus’, a word which is sometimes used in a derogatory way to describe a person with disability, but actually etymologically simply means an unspecifiable object.

However, the day that Alex and Riana were due to fly to Melbourne to motion capture their duet in March 2020 was the beginning of Victoria’s covid lockdown. As the weeks of lockdown in Victoria stretched into months, it became clear that a radical shift in plan was necessary.

Fortunately, concepts and methods that I have been developing through blindness proved helpful. Firstly, I had been working with blundering, which literally means to stumble blindly, as a performative method, and more generally, as a way of thinking about handling the intangible and the unknown, for dealing with uncertainty, for moving through precarious landscapes and times. I had also been working with refiguring audiodescription as a creative medium.

I had the idea of asking Alex and Riana to improvise separately to Tommy Carroll’s track, and to describe their movement score to me, long distance, over the phone, a kind of audiodescriptive score. They agreed, and thus through the months of lockdown, I diligently learned their choreographies. I would rise at dawn, before I needed to be homeschooling my son, to practice the two movement scores in my bush studio on Djaara country, gradually melding Alex and Riana’s movement sequences, effectively internalising their duet within my body, while around me the birds sang their dawn chorus.

In late 2020, sound artist Bryan Phillips moved with his family to our place in the bushlands, so that we could work together, as we homeschooled our boys. Bryan and his son Samuel would rise early at dawn to record the sounds of me rehearsing the Bella Room duet in the bush. Bryan has been a collaborator over several years exploring different ways we could expand the idea of audiodescription to describe the making processes of objects and installations, to describe how a work comes into being. With the Bella Room commission, we felt that it was the sounds of the bush, the sounds of my moving and my exertion that most faithfully described the making process.

As well as experiments in audiodescription, I am also interested in developing parallel visual descriptions, through the influence of Deaf collaborators such as dancer Anna Seymour and artist Luke King. So while I was rehearsing my cane dance in the bush, I wore a GoPro camera on my head, that recorded Djaara Country swirling around me as I danced. I enjoyed the way the camera faced away from me, destabilising spectatorship. This allowed a refusal to be visually observed myself, while also offering Deaf audiences a parallel to the audiodescription, a visual collage that faithfully describes the process of me learning and rehearsing the duet.

When lockdown lifted briefly in late 2021, I left my bush solitude for the first time in eight months, to motion capture the duet, which by now was deeply embedded in my body memory. With the help of animator Kenny Smith, I selected some time slices of the duet, to 3d print as 1:10 scaled models. I selected two of the models to fabricate life-size, at 1:1 scale. The blue colour of these choreographic objects references the blue of my mobility cane, which is itself an homage to two video works dealing with blindness, Derek Jarman’s ‘Blue’, and Moyra Davey’s ‘Notes on Blue’. This shade of blue also approximates Yves Klein blue, for I like the way that the sculptural choreographic objects can be understood as imprinting movement, like Klein did with the bodies of women, but without the misogynist overtones. Instead, I offer an imprint of movement oriented through disability and mothering, grounded in acknowledgment of home and my debt to Jaara country.

Entering the Bella Room, one sculpture is fixed to the ground, and the other is be suspended from the ceiling. The quadruphonic sound work plays on loop, an ambient audiodescription of the creation of the sculptural works, through the sounds of my rehearsals in Jaara Country. A two channel video work offers the parallel visual description, created from the GoPro footage. The editing approach plays with extreme myopia and hallucinatory recall, both aspects of my visual experience. The two screens are perpendicular walls, disrupted by the sculptural forms, an exhibition logic I encouraged, given my interest in obscured vision.

In a separate room is a 3-channel video work of my dancing cane, an artefact of the motion capture animation process. As Tommy Carroll’s Dances for Different Bodies plays, Bella Room visitors are invited to dance along, with their own improvised choreography. In a sense those who accept this invitation will be dancing a duet with me, and also with Riana and Alex, and with Tommy Carroll too. Thus I titled the work: With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…

Read more about the Jackson Bella Commission, including a video interview about the making of the work, at the MCA Artist Page.

Bella Room installation: Fibreglass sculptures; 2-channel HD video, colour; quadruphonic sound work; 3-channel HD video, colour.

Choreography by Alex Craig and Riana Head-Toussaint. Sound recording and composition by Bryan Phillips. Video edit with Zoe Scoglio. Animation by Kenny Smith. Rehearsal track by Tommy Carroll.

With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four (2022)

Fayen d’Evie with Alex Craig, Riana Head-Toussaint, Bryan Phillips, Zoe Scoglio, Kenny Smith, and Tommy Carroll.

Solo exhibition commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, for the 2022 Jackson Bella Room.

18 Feb 2022 - TBC October 2023

Upper gallery: Fayen d’Evie, With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…, 2021, fibreglass, quadrophonic sound, multi-channel HD videos, colour, digital animation, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for the Jackson Bella Room, 2021, image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacque Manning.

Video 1: Fayen d’Evie, With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…, 2021, fibreglass, quadrophonic sound, multi-channel HD videos, colour, digital animation, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for the Jackson Bella Room, 2021. Excerpt of 2-channel HD video courtesy and © the artist. Video edit with Zoe Scoglio.

Video 2: Fayen d’Evie, With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…, 2021, fibreglass, quadrophonic sound, multi-channel HD videos, colour, digital animation, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for the Jackson Bella Room, 2021. Excerpt of 3-channel HD video courtesy and © the artist. Animation by Kenny Smith.

Lower gallery:
MCA School Holiday workshop, 2022, featuring: Fayen d’Evie, With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…, 2021, fibreglass, quadrophonic sound, multi-channel HD videos, colour, digital animation, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for the Jackson Bella Room, 2021, image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jaimi Joy