Shared Practice

What Are You Doing? is a studio-based shared practice session where artists share processes and ways of working in the studio. It is not quite a class, not quite a choreographic workshop, a session where ways of making dance and practising dance are opened up as a community resource. It will take place the first Wednesday of every month.  

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Past Sessions 2024:

Tuesday 3rd September - Zee Zunnur​

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Session: 

This workshop will illuminate ways in which dancers can connect with their inner rhythms while embracing the ecstasy of movement to a soundtrack of groovy beats. This session is a space to practice connected embodiment with oneself, and discover the totality and power of our body through guided movement explorations. Zee will share her Morphology movement practice & various tools she uses in her choreographic works.

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Bio: 

Zee Zunnur is a movement artist who was a long-time dancer with Hofesh Shechter Company (UK). As she threads through her practice in the contemporary realms, she stays rooted and connected to her Malay heritage and folk training in Malay dance. Other than touring internationally as a performer and teacher with Hofesh Shechter Company, she has been invited as a guest artist, performed and choreographed for T.H.E. Dance Company, T.H.E. (Second) Dance Company, M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ignition Dance Festival, Esplanade da:ns Festival Singapore, Singapore Biennale and more.

Presently based in Australia, she has worked with the Pre-Professional Year in Sydney Dance Company, STRUT Dance, Co3 Australia, Mitch Harvey Company, James Vu Anh Pham, Juliet Burnett, Brooke Leeder, Rachel Ogle, WAAPA, Fremantle Biennale, and recently co-choreographed a work alongside Marrugeku presenting it at Sydney Festival and Perth Festival 2024. Most recently was a work she choreographed for the LINK Dance Company of WAAPA.

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Wednesday 3rd July - Leah Landau ​​​​

Session: 

In resistance to the demand of constant artistic production, Notebook-ness is a workshop for dancers and choreographers at all stages of practice to look back on their notes. They are invited to bring their artist notebooks - both current and old; many books and one; analogue and digital - and work alone, alongside each-other, together as a group. Participants work with practical tools such as compiling index/glossaries, using colour as time-codes, numbering pages and navigating  'data versus information'. Speculative writing methods, as well as subtle ways of paying attention while working attune participants to different levels of focus, distance and scale. Questions participants are invited to explore are: What sort of structures and tactics do artists work with, implicitly? How does this change over time? What does the relative (dis)order of documentation reveal?

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More information on Notebook-ness can be found here

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Wednesday 15 May - Emma Riches

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Session:  Emma will share processes she is currently working with to develop a new solo work, never are (working title). This includes guided, progressive improvisations as well as looking at a ‘survival kit’ of strategies to find ways of collaborating in lieu of having anyone else in the room. We will incorporate chance methods in order to ‘remove the ego’ (as Matteo Fargion would say).

 

Bio: Originally from the Blue Mountains, Emma Riches is a dance artist who has relocated back home in 2023. Over the past decade she has worked as an independent artist across both Victoria and NSW. She works across performance, choreography and teaching, with an interest in the intersection of these roles and ways they inform each other.

Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts (BFA Dance, 2015) and Ev and Bow Full-time Dance Training Centre (2012), Emma’s work has been commissioned by the University of Melbourne and presented at M1 CONTACT Festival Singapore, Sunshine Art Spaces, MPavillion, Strawberry Fields Music Festival (Tocumwal NSW), West Projections Festival and Melbourne Fringe Festival through the Compass Professional Development Program.

Emma has been a choreographic resident at several institutions across Australia including GUTS Dance, Strut National Choreographic Centre of WA, Lucy Guerin Inc, Schoolhouse Studios, Temperance Hall and Dancehouse. Her work has received support from The University of Western Sydney, Creative Victoria, Regional Arts Victoria, Merribek City Council, University of Melbourne, Gandel Philanthropy and through Ausdance NSW’s DAIR program.

Emma is currently working on a choreographic writing project titled ‘The Not New Project’; a collaboration with Dance Is. TNNP is a bite-sized online publication that commissions artists and profiles specific facets of dance practice. 

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Wednesday 10th April - Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Ria Soemardjo

Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Ria Soemardjo warmly invite anybody interested in movement, voice, contemporary performance to gain insight into the world building of their new work, Ngayomi/Shelter. Arriving and warming up with movement resonance and interlocking rhythm practices. Then exploring their unique storytelling approach incorporating craft-animism sculptures in creating intimate performance rituals.

 

Biographies:

Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal is a performer, choreographer and creative collaborator. Born in Darkinjung Country her Javanese ancestry directly descends from Yogyakarta’s first Sultan, Java’s Borobudur temple and equally Australian Scottish Viking convict-settler. Her unique dance language is forged in classical ballet, jazz, modern, Javanese court arts, Bali temple ritual, eco-somatic improvisation and creative collaboration with First Nations Australian dance artists. Awarded High Distinction for a Master of Choreography Research at VCA Melbourne
University (2010) her entrancing intercultural transdisciplinary work has been created and performed in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Newtown High of the Performing Arts Dux (Sydney 1995), Bachelor Dance Honours
(University of Florida USA 2000) and Dharmasiswa Scholar (Yogyakarta University of the Arts, Indonesia 2004) all support 30 years of award-winning touring and international dance-culture-embodiment studies and teaching. Performance history embraces live arts, working with Movement Research NYC, Miami Dance Futures, Australian Choreographic Centre, The Bodycartography Project, Mirramu
Dance Company, ImpulsTanz DanceWeb, PAF, Victorian Opera, Chunky Move, Indonesia Contemporary Art Network, Critical Path and NORPA.
An experienced mentor with Arts Northern Rivers, Outback Theatre for Young People, Beyond Empathy and Sprung!! and co-directs Angourie Dance Youth Project. Multimedia dance works presented in theatres, galleries, museums, video, public and wild spaces include touring productions Opal Vapour (2012), Enfold (2016) and 6/7 Empty (2010). Her current major work in development with Kirk Page is ‘Smoke’, a trans-indigenous intercultural collaboration. www.jadedewi.com

 

Ria Soemardjo is a Melbourne based musician with a passion for collaborations across diverse genres and artforms. Her distinct, haunting vocal style and musicality reflects her Australian/Javanese cultural heritage and a deep appreciation for the timbres, rhythmic complexity and ceremonial association of Balinese and Javanese gamelan traditions. She has studied Central and West Javanese vocal repertoire and is highly respected in the world music scene and Australian Indonesian community for her performances with gamelan ensembles around Australia.

Dance work compositions receiving recognition include Ros Warby’s ‘Tower Suites’ (2012 Green Room Award with cellist Helen Mountfort), Enfold (2016) and Opal Vapour (2013) with dancer/choreographer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal.
In 2019 together with director/writer Sandra Fiona Long and Bandung Mainteater, Ria created music and vocal scores for ‘Hades Fading’ - a bi-lingual multimedia theatre work (Bandung 2019, AsiaTOPA Festival 2020).

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Saturday 30th March - Max Revel

ReadyMade Works is running a special Easter weekend session of What Are You Doing? with dancer Max Revell, currently in Australia performing with the Akram Khan Company in Jungle Book Reimagined.

The session is focused on improvisation puzzles and concepts that are derived from the dance style popping. Using a variety of techniques within traditional contemporary practices and the illusionary dance forms participants will learn how to improvise freely using these simple structures correctly. 

Growing up in Cornwall, Max began training in Plymouth, taking breaking and popping classes with Street Factory from age nine, later returning there to teach. As a teenager he travelled across the UK competing in battles, and worked with several theatre companies before joining Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. In 2019 he won the BBC Young Dancer competition, graduating NSCD in 2020 he joined postgraduate company Verve. He has enjoyed working with The Hiccup Project, Frantic Assembly, Patricia Okenwa, Gary Clarke, Eleanor Sikorski, Susanne Thomas, Dickson Mbi, Tony Adigun, Barnaby Booth, Botis Seva, Caroline Finn, and Matthew Robinson. Max is currently a member of the Akram Khan Company, performing in the world tour of Jungle Book

Reimagined.

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Image Credit: courtesy of Max Revell

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Wednesday 6th March - CONJAH (Ooshcon and Jahra Wasasala)

ooshcon's bio: Embedded in love and devoted to flow - ooshcon is a Samoan ‘decipher of circles’, who specialises in free-body methodologies. The core belief ‘ina ia sosolo le alofa / so love may flow’ is imbued into ooshcon’s evolving practice and way of being.
ooshcon’s work is grounded and actualised through the forms and philosophies of Waving Dance culture, Krump Dance culture, Animation Dance, Geometric Dance, Breath-work and Character/Entity-building. ooshcon embraces these forms with emotional rigour and innovative theatrical practices in pursuit of ‘formlessness’.
ooshcon is a trusted facilitator throughout his practice and communities. Through his work ooshcon strives to symbolically assist others to journey into new personal depths and build on their own ‘emotional content’.

Jahra's bio: Jahra (Arieta) Wasasala is a Fijian world-builder, movement psychopomp and writer of realms.
Within Viti, they hail from the provinces of Macuata and Ba.
Jahra is geographically based in the relational space in-between one world ending and another world beginning.
Through the eye of 'Oceanic Terror-fi', future-mythos and the genealogy of terror and transmutation, Jahra constantly moves towards being Spirit-led and blood-led in their evolving creative offerings.
As an ‘unreal within a beyond-body’, Jahra centres the dance and voice of the 'beyond-body' as their tool of transmutation, serving as the beginning and returning point for their world-building and world-bending practice. Jahra’s training continues to evolve, currently encompassing Krump, Physical Theatre, Body Control techniques, Butoh study, Waving, Character work and ‘Creature-Conditioning’, which comprises of movement mobility and strength training and non-human movement research. Jahra’s theatre-making and research practice is multi-disciplinary and multi-bodied. Their practice is pantheon-based, grounded in belief and speaks into Indigenous future-mythos, culminating in a genre of ‘Oceanic Terror-fi’. Intuitive yet deliberate, disciplined yet Spirit-led, Jahra’s public practice is known for it’s other-worldly physicality, theatrical immersion and transcendent performance level. 

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Wednesday 31st Jan - Jill Crovisier 

Session: Jill Crovisier will start her shared practice with a gentle warm up using improvisation to guide the participants in space and giving an insight into some of her movement research. The session will then focus on character works methods she is regularly using in her creations. Within a theatrical approach the idea is to share creative tools and give the participants a moment of playful and physical exploration.

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Biography: Born in Luxembourg in 1987, the award-winning artist Jill Crovisier works as a dancer, choreographer, video artist, sound creator , pedagogue and artistic director of JC movement production (a company established in 2013 and funded by the Ministry of Culture Luxembourg ). Jill has been travelling the world for 20 years and has taken part in numerous dance festivals, renowned choreographic competitions and collaborated with a large number of companies and institutions. The multidisciplinary artist, who won the Luxembourgish Dance Award in 2019, emphasises authenticity and realism, using dance to communicate stories about life and identity. She places a strong emphasis on creating work that is inclusive and emotionally engaging, even for those who may not be familiar with contemporary dance.

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