As we fold in and out of ourselves, others and the space, we experience time and space and an eternal becoming. It is in the vertiginous thrill of the dance that we know about risk, desire, dissolving and continuous integration.
Alice Cummins
Alice Cummins is a dance artist, Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) Practitioner and internationally qualified movement educator (ISMETA). Based in Melbourne, she is a master teacher who offers her independent workshops throughout Australia. Alice’s work is influenced by Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) and New Dance practices. She has been researching different modes and realizations of the body and performance over many years and often outside of institutions and the traditional places for the transference of performance knowledge. Alice also teaches in university departments of: dance, theatre, visual art and the built environment. She has a Masters from Victoria University and in 2009 she taught at Denison University, Ohio.
Alice’s performance career has given her the privilege of working with many wonderful artists across different artforms. She has collaborated with musicians, writers, visual artists and filmmakers as well as creating solo work. Since moving to Melbourne in 2005 Alice has continued this engagement through collaborations with: performer Al Wunder; musician Anita Hustas; poet Ashley Higgs and musician Forbes Hawkins. Her Masters performance, hear her breathe: a rhapsody of gravity, space and the body is her most recent work (2008). Before returning to Australia in June 2009, Alice worked with New York based choreographer Rose-Anne Spradlin, a recent Guggenheim recipient.
My current interests and concerns as a dance-maker and teacher:
My teaching occurs in an environment of refined awareness and arises from a deeply felt and embodied place. My approach is accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and I welcome the richness and contribution of this in the learning and sharing of knowledge. It is my intention to create an environment of learning that is supportive and inspirational whilst also being rigorous.
As a dance-maker I am developing a practice that shifts, transforms and or elucidates states of moving and being. I have an enduring interest in making work that involves each of our stories and where they might meet, overlap or interrupt each other. I am interested in the challenge of how we might live alongside each other in ways that honour and acknowledge difference as we simultaneously develop resilience.