The Wild Edge
Through the interdisciplinary performance and media work, The Wild Edge, Bonemap creates its down-to-earth iconography. Reflecting on lived experience within environmental space and building layers of substance that unfold with personal meaning. However, there are real questions about how we inhabit the environment and reconcile colonial and capitalist exploitation of ecological spaces?
It is from an environmental relationship that we seek an enlightened understanding of human identity. Ecological change regulates an immediate interrelational process. The wide-ranging effect of global human activity has become the dominant factor shifting environmental adaptability. While much human activity appears to remain unsustainable, a more radically transparent attitude to the ecosphere has emerged. Art and mindfulness create an essential mechanism to cope with the pressures of ecological anxiety. Our populations and communities are now the primary drivers of an environmental future, and it is critical to see that, and steer towards the best outcomes for the future.
Bonemap investigates the subtlety of experience by engaging in environmental interventions that question the relationship between the body and the world around it. Artistic context is integrated into layers of meaning already intrinsic to a place. By embedding the dancing body with an environmental site, the proposition challenges Western cultural inscription through the displacement of theatrical conceit. It further pursues interdisciplinary artistic collaboration and activity by exploring visual and performing arts as an integrated site-specific expression.
The methodology investigates the relationship between body and environment by observing the macro environment (more extensive than the human body) and the microenvironment (smaller than the body). These are rich sources of metaphor, both physical and metaphysical. They represent relationships centred around a body in motion and therefore can be related to universal themes. The relationship of movement within a particular environmental space is an area of research that provides insight into distinct endemic and cultural differences. How much identity is placed into and upon the body through the environment both physically and ethnologically?
The title 'The Wild Edge' derives from Mike Davis's 1998 book The Ecology of Fear. The writing ranges over the imagination of disaster as both the content of art and as dangerous proximity to larger environmental forces, specifically Southern California. However, it makes salient points about the future of urbanised humanity, including that "we can never avoid the unintended ecological consequences of our actions" and that we exist in a "strange choreography of the wild and the urban."
artists:
Bonemap: Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge
art photography: Glen O'Malley
sound: Silent Beat: Michael Whiticker and Paul Lawrence
international visiting artist: Lee Wen (Singapore)
venues: dates 2000
Canberra - Choreographic Centre:
Choreographic Fellowship Feb28 - Mar 5:
Performances 2 - 4 March
Cairns - Tanks Art Centre:
Australian National Dance Week Event:
Residency (Tank 5) 13 - 21 May:
Performances 18, 19, 20 May
Tokyo - World Dance 2000: Celebrating the Millennium
Conference and Festival July 31 - Aug 5:
Asian Next Wave, Theatre Tram, Tokyo
Townsville - Umbrella Studio Association inc.:
Exhibition Aug 21 - Sept 3:
'Flinders Street West' Performance Aug 25
Townsville - Magnetic Island National Park:
'The Forts' Performance Aug 27
Brisbane Powerhouse:
l'attitude 27.5° & MAAP Residency 9 - 24 Sept:
Exhibition 11 - 24 Sept:
Performances 21, 22, 23 Sept
Principal Sponsors: The Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland, The Choreographic Centre.
Major Sponsor: Cairns City Council, Townsville City Council, RADF
Sponsors: Umbrella Studios, Brisbane Powerhouse - Centre for the live arts, Kick Arts Collective, Ausdance (QLD). Endorsements: North Queensland Xray Services
Video documentation to come:
