Participant Spectator Meeting Places

Abstract

During 2013–2014, visual and performing artists from the Australian dance collective, Remnant Dance, were invited to make a contemporary dance film together with young people from a Children’s Centre in Myanmar. The experience of the Australian artists moving together with Myanmar youth enabled dialogue through expressive gestures. The dance-making was visceral, generating embodied engagement for participants who were both performers and spectators in the act of dancing together. The creation and exhibition of a dance film about places of meeting in/through dance, and as contextualized within a larger body of artistic work, illuminated how each individual might be a participant, performer, collaborator, and/or spectator. Questions concerning spectatorship were raised as the young Myanmar participants became performers and then spectators of their own work. International touring of the evolving artistic work, Meeting Places, then invited new audiences to reflect on how dance-making with others might challenge assumptions as to who the collaborators, participants, performers and/or spectators are in art-making and performance experiences.