Amaara Raheem and Zoe Scoglio are The Reenactors, adapting embodied creative practices they have come into contact with. For Arts House Housewarming Project (2021) they reenacted ‘The Walking Reading Group: On Care’ run by Lydia Ashman and Ania Bas (UK). The project asked participants to listen to and read a selection of texts ‘on care’ before collectively digesting them through walking and talking. The Reenactors mapped a route through the suburb of North Melbourne and as they traversed the roads, parks, lanes and river-ways they acknowledge that they’re walking on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and the Woiwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin nation. They acknowledge that practices of walking as ways of reading the country and talking (yarning) has been practiced by Indigenous Australians for many thousands of years. For The ‘Walking Reading Group: On Care’ The Reenactors led participants on an already mapped out route however, walking and talking together is an ongoing dance/movement improvisation practice and performance work; ways in which to ask, how does reading texts affect the way we see and hear our environment and how does reading the environment change how we read and speak about texts? TThe Reenactors are particularly interested in how creative practice gets reconfigured into another cultural context and ecology; how bodies–bodies of practice, bodies of words, bodies of thought–migrate.
Care is an important pursuit in the practice of reenactment and The Reenactors were careful to select and share readings that approach ‘on care’ from feminist, environmental, queer, Indigenous and black theoretical points of view. Here, acts of reading are inflected by practices such as listening-with-the-whole-body, attentiveness to humans and the other than humans, responsiveness and reflexivity. To reenact then is to care-fully pay attention to the ground beneath their feet and from time to time, remember that a river still runs beneath the ground beneath their feet.
This project came about because both Amaara and Zoe are of multiple belongings. Respectively they have made home in Asia, Europe, UK and Australia and now they both find themselves living and working in regional Victoria. The Reenactors acknowledge that their practice of performance, of writing and reading is also of multiple belongings. They’re interested in a more collective, ethical, mutually-made, tentacular process where where choreography is migrant, and reading words, reading place un/settles within a wider mobility.
16-17 April 2021, The Reenactors: The Walking Reading Group, Arts House
Review by Andrew Furhman in The Age, 15 April 2021
All photos by Keelan O’Hehir (2021)
