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We understood Speak Local would be a chance for the local artists to show and speak to their work within this context. We devised a structure that resonated and echoed imageries or themes between the two performances, thereby allowing a fluid crossover between them. We were exploring new interests with the common starting point of spices. We had very limited time, so in our only site visit we just decided on use of space and flow. AS WeiZen elected to work outside with the spices and I wanted to occupy the whole hall. So the task was to guide the audience from outside to inside, from WeiZen’s performance to a different experience where I directed the audience to enact a ceremony. To do this I asked everyone to remove their shoes on entering, thus providing some of the props I required. However being orderly Australians everyone left their shoes neatly at the threshold, nothing like what happens in Asia! I set other shoes along the line of white cloth and laid out squares of different spices. At the end I washed people’s feet. I read WeiZen’s performance text,
expressing in prosaic form the injustices of Colonisation. We left her in a wild dance covered in spices to enter the serene space of the ceremonial line, a walk enacted by the public to complete the artwork, an image of monks, meditation, pilgrimage, or indeed of trudging repetitive labour. This new work concept is open to multiple readings. WeiZen and I started working together through practical necessity, and explore imagined meetings in our performative exchanges. My practice incorporates movement and spatial interventions, where the body is a core motif and device, and performativity becomes a mutable notion between artist and spectator. My interests are in embodied experience, architectural framing, and the diasporic condition. I pursue an activation of space, whether through solo action or a public choreography. At Speak Local I set up a spice walkway, an installation that was enacted by the audience. This became both a ritualised event and a public art, entailing trust and risk on my part through collaboration with the audience. As a first generation Australian whose parents emigrated and met here as a result of the Holocaust of World War II, I’m possessed by