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Through interconnecting human, nonhuman, and place, the performances at the heart of Sense (an)other countered binary oppositions and resisted normative forms of art production. They did so via prompts and poetics in performance scores that evolved the potential for imagining affect in real-time encounters with others.

 

The creative process began in the dance studio with experiments using written prompts and drawings that were responded to through improvisation. This material developed a series of choreographic scores influenced by John Cage and Deborah Hay. These scores asked ‘can I move as a microorganism and communicate with plants through underground fungal networks? Such an interest in mycorrhizal fungi resonated with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and in working non-linearly. 

 

From a desire to bring queerness into the research I found the collaborative queer artist practice, bttm/bottom methodology by Richard Orjis and val smith. Their collaborative projects Bttm manifesto (2018–present) and bttm methodology (2019) deployed socio-ecological and relational practices that disrupt white cis-heteronormative male forms of knowledge. Orienting with bttm methodology my practice prioritised indigenous, feminist and LGBTQIA+ voices and attempted to sense-with the funga, fauna and flora. 

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Placing my performance outside in the public space I drew from dance artist researcher Becca Wood’s Choreoauratic Headphonic Scores (2015) to create a headphonic score that traced a choreography through Rangipuke (Albert Park). I placed my performance in the park and invited the audience to sense the visible and invisible, such as the mycelial networks spreading underground and spores floating in the air that we breathed. The headphonic score was an attempt to attune into the fungal, neural, social and radio networks activated in the performance.   

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Please see my thesis for further reading and to listen to the headphonic score.