Photo by Carol Brown
This lecture-performance was presented at the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) Conference, December 2022 at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland.
‘The Red Shoes’ takes on the historical, aesthetic, autobiographic and magical qualities of the red shoes, unearthing notions of ‘travelling together’ and ‘withness’. Through focusing on this specific object and its occult powers, this lecture-performance proposes to explore choreography and magic. The legendary ruby slippers worn by Dorothy in the film ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939) represent transformation and bewitched link to ‘home’. With one click of the red shoes, Dorothy is transported back to the farm, at the speed of magic: a click, a snap, a pop, a flick. The red shoes continue as an object of passion and power in a film of the same title directed by Powell and Pressburger (1948). The plot based on the 1845 eponymous fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, where a young peasant girl (a ballerina in the film) becomes enamoured with a pair of red shoes that dance her to her death. Further, my choreographic practice operates in two kinds of time. 1. slowness and 2. At the speed of magic. I think these timings – slow and magic – are not binaries but exist in relation. Drawing on the work of theorist Silvia Federici on witchcraft and capitalism, the scores by dance-witch Charlie Ashwell, and the writings on ‘Pleasure Activism’ by Adrienne Marie Brown I propose the red shoes as an emergent strategy; activating fairytales as method in order to ask, how and what does dancing allow us to see, hear, feel, intuit and know?
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