Body I(s)land

Body I(s)land premiered for the Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa at the Herald Theatre 2020.
Real time healing, reflective conversations, bodies in perpetual impact pathways, equalising each other's internal pressure, touch triggered memories and supporting each other's change. This work utilises the principles and beliefs of a physical hands on body method, to visit and understand an array of relationships and scenarios presented through the body’s own story in dance.

Concept and Direction: Kelly Nash

Body I(s)land performers and ConTact C.A.R.E Students and Practitioners: Kelly Nash, Nancy Wijohn, Daniel Cooper, Rosie Tapsell

Sound Design and Performer: Rowan Pierce

Review and reflections: Theatre view

‘Body island. Body is land. Body, I land. Kelly Nash’s Body I(s)land, performed by Kelly Nash, Nancy Wijohn, Daniel Cooper, and Rosie Tapsell (with sound by Rowan Pierce), stemmed from their collective practice of ConTact C.A.R.E., a bodywork method founded by Dale Speedy focusing on a constant “moving away from pain”.

Body I(s)land tracks how we land in our bodies, in moments that limn death and quiet bliss. Throughout the performance, a screen in the upstage left corner showed slow-motion footage of people careening down hills in cheese-rolling competitions, airborne babies caught after being thrown out of burning buildings, and strange, engrossing shots of reclining horses and AA batteries. I watched an astronaut work through the gentle bloat of gravity on the moon, and I thought of my body (never not dancing) as what Deborah Hay calls a “spewing multidimensional reconfiguring nonlinear embodiment of potentiality”.

Co-present with the video, live performers sketched the contours of their own sensual curiosity in questing dances of perception. They vibrated their kidneys, wrapped themselves in foam hands and rolled across the floor, and wrestled with a tightly sealed jar of pickles. A voiceover asked us to consider the absurdity of the whole ‘I’ in favour of the innumerable I/eyes of our anatomical existence: the ‘I’ of my left patella, or the ‘eye’ of the soles of my feet. All my innumerable ‘I/eyes’ loved this dance.’

Reflection by Amit Noy