Holidays and other news

Holidays:

I’ve been resting - allowing myself the space and time for imagination and inspiration, for a fresh beginning to 2011. It’s been too long since I swam daily in the ocean, slept under the stars and cooked on an open fire. Two weeks of bliss – a holiday! I was on the south coast of WA with towering Karri and Tingle forests, ocean and rivers for swimming and great local goodwill. The wine and olive oil a treat!

I ran a one-day workshop in the lovely town of Denmark – a creative community of dance, theatre and performance folk. (Denmark is my dreaming place – I spent my first four years here and I feel a deep sense of attachment to this very beautiful and varied landscape). Wonderful to catch up with Silvia Lehmann and her family; I first taught Silvia as an under-graduate student.

Now I am home in Melbourne, I feel the benefit of my holiday in every cell.

Coming Workshops:

The Membrane Workshop will be my first teaching for the year in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. My theme is, “Navigating the interface,” highlighting the significance of the membrane in the transfer of nourishment and knowledge between cells, bodies and persons. The connective tissue of membrane extends through to our social life and physical environment.

Private Practice:

I am getting strong interest in my private sessions in Sydney and Perth, before or after the workshops.

In Melbourne, my private practice is moving to Fitzroy, where I have the good fortune to share a beautiful new space with Alexander Teacher, Jane Refshauge. The room is large and spacious with a timber floor. It will be wonderful for private work and small groups. I am thrilled to have this new space and to have Jane as a colleague.

See link for details of sessions and address: www.alicecummins.com

Riddells Creek Studio:

With Ross Colliver, I am preparing the studio at Riddells Creek ­– a sprung wooden floor, 20 x 10 metres. We are planning to hold the first open workshop/retreat in October this year!

It’s a glorious environment: Barrm Birrm Bush Reserve; walking tracks; birds and starry nights. There is a train to Riddells Creek Station that will bring you from Southern Cross Station in 45 mins, and of course great food and sublime dancing!

I look forward to seeing you during the year of the White Rabbit … watch out Alice!

My Practice:

Returning to the studio is always a challenge. Teaching involves a very different focus on other’s needs; this return to myself is vital to the philosophical and soulful life of the bodymind. I am enjoying the solitude it offers me, along with the nuance and subtlety of engaging with my dance.

Performances:

Melbourne – performance/installation what matters most is what happens next,coordinated by Ashley Higgs, February 23 – 31 March. Experimental Art Space, 2ndFloor, Union House, University of Melbourne.

Sydney – Whip It, February 26 at 8pm, Heffron Hall, 225–245 Palmer Street,Darlinghurst.

Reading

Over the summer I have been reading Paul Carter’s, Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region (UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia, 2010). Carter is investigating the particularity of the Mallee region of Victoria – the complex layering of everything that happened in that landscape, and not just the heroic recorded history of white settlement. “The ground is not passive, it is the generative matrix of an understanding that exists solely at that spot – situated, timely and often rubbed out” (p4). It provoked many thoughts for me in regard to how we live in this land, and the ways in which we continue to colonise through how we perceive and speak about the land. I always feel there is a connection between this and the ways in which we speak of, care and live in our bodies.

 Carter proposes that we consider assumptions of charted cartographic knowledge and learn about the ways in which we might care for place through an attending to detail and to the local: “… the eye that sees does not have the hard stare of the coloniser: it attends and tends, it leans as the poet hearkens to something on the horizon of definition” (p124). He writes about the layers of delicate lived life informing what lies in the landscape and that each of us contributes to that topography by moving through it. I am moved by this seemingly simple yet profound aesthetic way of creating value around the ways in which we move through our days creating a life, in the landscape and in the world. “Creative regions are polyhedral and the trick in narrating them is to return to various passages between the connecting points, looking not only at the tracks of those who went before, but at your own impressions which now form part of the landscape” (p4).