In 2021 I was invited to curate Now Pieces at Dancehouse along with Kevin Jeynes. Over two years I was Lead Curator. This meant that I curated seven Now Pieces over two years. I was also responsible for inviting other curators to come on board and overseeing their process. In this role, I was instrumental in setting up the guiding principles of intergenerational, interdisciplinary, intercultural values to bring new practitioners and new audiences into the field of improvisation-for-performance.

What is Now Pieces?

On the last Sunday of the month, Now Pieces offers an improvisational performance evening at Dancehouse dedicated to low-fi public performances curated by and featuring local dance luminaries.

Now Pieces builds on the lineage of Cecil St Studio, a dance studio in Melbourne for 21 years that is now earmarked for demolition. Now Pieces continues a long standing disciplined exploration of embodied performance practice that leads to crafted, spontaneous and artful communication made on-the-go. This monthly event invites a range of intergenerational practitioners who — in one way or another — prioritise movement to incorporate body, sound, vocalisation, memory, image and energy, responding to each passing moment in relation to the space where they are dancing in relation to the audience.

What is a Creative Correspondent?

Now Pieces runs on a shoestring budget and there are no funds for a professional photographer / videographer. This got me thinking, what is the role of documentation in improvised performance anyway? Maybe there’s other ways to ‘document’ what’s happening in the ‘now’. This is how I came to set up a Creative Correspondent project. For each NP we invite an artist from another discipline to ‘document’ Now Pieces in any way they want. Through the various events we’ve had a textile artist, a playwright, a poet, visual artists, musicians, VCA MA students and an astrologer make responses to Now Pieces.

Here’s one of my favourite creative responses, from Roslyn Helper, for Now Pieces #4 (curated by Lilian Steiner and Siobhan McKenna):