Vanessa White
'Songs of Becoming' - Screen Dance
'Songs of Becoming'
Dancers:
Peter Fraser
Frank van de Ven
Videographer:
Vanessa White
Sound Design:
Dale Gorfinkel
Sponsors and Support:
Arts Mildura
Helen Vivian
Ross Lake
Thanks:
Riley Davison, Erica Tarquinio,
Dean Worthington, Domenico de Clario,
Gareth Hart, Rach Kendrigan,
Matt Shortt, Mildura Brickworks
and Andrew Buffon
For this dance film we proposed five ‘songs’ to be elaborated through improvised dance
Each song was based on a way of understanding and experiencing identity
as illusion, connection between beings, in-betweenness, multiplicity or ecologically-entangled
Each ‘song’ had its own physical character, location, time of day, and suggested camera approach.
Weather, locations and time available re-shaped what we did, but the work remained driven by these ‘song’ themes. Our attempt to experience and explore disparate modes of identity was not meant to be explicitly visible but to give us a shared focus free of everyday self-consciousness.
Frank van de Ven, Peter Fraser
Songs of Becoming was danced and filmed at sites around Mildura -red sand dunes, riverside scrub, a salt lake and a disused Brickworks -on Latji Latji, Nyeri Nyeri, Ngintait and Wergaia Country.
We would like to acknowledge the Latji Latji, Nyeri Nyeri, Ngintait,and Wergaia people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which we worked, along with their neighbours the Barkindji, Maraura, MuttiMutti, Tatti Tatti and Wotjabaluk people. We pay our respects to elders past and present.
Proudly supported by ARTS MILDURA
ARTIST BIO's
FRANK VAN DE VEN is a dancer and director who spent his formative years in Japan working with Min Tanaka and the Maijuku Performance Company (1983-92). In 1993, he founded with Katerina Bakatsaki Body Weather Amsterdam as a platform for training and performance. He performs, directs and teaches regularly all over Europe as well as in the USA, New Zealand and Australia. He has an ongoing commitment to his worldwide Body/Landscape series of immersive projects that research and develop consciousness of the body as an ever evolving, pulsing landscape within a greater surrounding landscape. Since 1995 he leads the annual, interdisciplinary Bohemiae Rosa Project with Milos Sejn (Academy of Art & Design, Prague, Czech Republic,) connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture. For more info on Body Weather Amsterdam: bodyweatheramsterdam.nl
PETER FRASER performs improvised and site-specific dance, musical collaborations and installations. His work, over three decades, includes extended desert inhabitations, theatre projects and durational performance. He worked extensively with De Quincey Co ensemble whose guiding practice is Body Weather, which conceives body, mind and environment as intermingled and fluid. He co-founded the Environmental Performance Authority (EPA) which creates place-based participatory performance. Recent projects include Ros Crisp’s DIRt [dance in regional disaster zones] and his ongoing practice includes Sounds Like Movement, a duo with instrument-builder/musician Dale Gorfinkel, exploring the relationship of movement, materials/objects and sound; About Now improvisation research quartet; and Prophets stylefree music group. Peter’s workshops aim to release the body from habits so that it is available to transformation by imagination and bodily sensation. His MA thesis investigated somatic Strategies for Truthful Performance.
VANESSA WHITE has a diverse creative output including video and painting. Her video work is expansive, drawing on ethereal performance traditions, in concert with images of the landscape and environment, to see how the reformulation of the body in motion can be made to perform and narrate meaning. In addition to training in dance and improvisational theatre, Vanessa has a Masters in Fine Art from Sydney College of the Arts and has worked extensively in film and television, including as a visual effects artist on the feature film The Matrix and SBS TV.
Recently her video work ’23° WEST’ screened in the 2022 Nordic Film Festival at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Her previous collaborative film with Gulsen Ozer and Ania Reynolds ‘Split Rock’ has gained International recognition. In 2022 at Tokyo International Short Film Festival, Japan, Honourable Mention; Global Shorts Film Festival, Award of Excellence; 2021 Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival, Honourable Mention.
National and international recognition include ‘Salt Lake’ acquired for permanent collection at LaTrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell. Screenings at Košice's Kunsthalle Museum, Slovakia 2020, Best Cinematographer, Alternative Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2019, collaborative screen and performance work at Espoo International City Theatre, Finland (2018) and collaborative film and glass work at Ebeltoft Glasmuseet (Glass Museum), Jutland, Denmark (2013). Her art works have also been acquired by Artbank, City of Yarra and Box Hill College of TAFE collections.