Hear Shelley Lasica in conversation with PICA’s Director/CEO Hannah Mathews as they discuss WHEN I AM NOT THERE. In this discussion, Lasica and Mathews examine the artist’s enduring relationship with her collaborators and her relationship to choreography.
The work of Shelley Lasica reveals a sustained exploration of dance, movement and the varying contexts in which they can occur. WHEN I AM NOT THERE provided an important occasion to reflect on forty years of Lasica’s choreographic practice and is the first project of its kind in Australia.
Presented as part the 2024 Djeran/Makuru season at PICA, WHEN I AM NOT THERE featured a mise-en-scène comprising new and existing elements, including contributions from the artist’s long-term collaborators and a new ensemble commissioned for the occasion and performed live for the duration of the gallery’s opening hours. Listen along here.
[Hannah Mathews] It’s really nice to see you all here. It’s a real privilege to be on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land, the Elders past, present and emerging and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with us here this evening.
[Shelley Lasica] Thank you, Hannah.
[HM] We’ve talked about this work quite a bit since it got made in 2022. I’ve been thinking about how to talk about this work with Shelley here in Perth – on the occasion of its third occurrence. Let’s start at the beginning, given that outside of the wonderful performers who work with Shelley, none of us were in Melbourne with you at that time. WHEN I AM NOT THERE – the work, the performance, the exhibition that we were all just in and enjoying – what is it? How do you describe it or introduce it to people? How do you introduce WHEN I AM NOT THERE?
[SL] Well, I could go a couple of different ways. I could just define it by the kind of thing that it is, or it isn’t, an exhibition/performance or a performance/exhibition. I had been working with my archive and then Hannah invited me to make a survey show and I said that I didn’t really want to.
[HM] There’s a tension in our working relationship that I really value.
[SL] I wanted to work out a way of looking at past work that was generative and not utopian, but future oriented. I recycle a lot of work and there’s a couple of people here who have worked with me in the past who will probably recognise bits and pieces. The tension between to exhibit and to perform is really interesting for me because both are to do with typology of spaces, but also to do with time. We were just talking about the sound and how directional and specific the sound is. Frank Tétaz did the score and used a whole lot of scores that he’d made for me in the past but made them into a system that is multi-channel and hugely spatial, so it sounds different when you’re in different parts of the work.
It also touches on the relationship between all the aspects of performing in a museum. Time is a big factor in both performing and exhibiting, as well as attention, expectation, duration and the feeling that there’s no particular point of view and there’s no way of holding everything. I feel like that’s true for both choreographic and the not choreographic objects.
[HM] Can I just jump in for a moment and maybe go a step back. When I worked for PICA as the curator from 2005-2007, it was the first time I’d worked in a multi arts organisation. Following that, I moved back to Melbourne and my partner was working at Arts House in North Melbourne and I found myself much more in the world of performance . That’s when Shelley and I first met, and I ended up making a project for Dance Massive, which was with a number of dance and choreographic artists up and down Errol Street in North Melbourne. That’s when our conversation and friendship started and around this time there was a lot of conversation about choreography in the museum. Stephanie Rosenthal came who was the artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney, there was a real focus on dance and choreography as it intersected with the visual arts.
Erin Brannigan, who many of you may know is dance academic at UNSW, along with Pip Wallis, who’s a curator in Melbourne, got together decided to put together an application. It was a bit of a hope and a wish, but what happened basically because its sort of the academy and industry and practice aligned, we put in this application and what almost fell through sky was this $400,000 grant for a research project called Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum. We used that money to commission a number of case studies with artists working with choreography across Australia and different partner venues, so that’s kind of the back story, right? The first one of those case studies and the first commission was Shelley and WHEN I AM NOT THERE. I was working as senior curator at Monash University Museum of Art at the time and the invitation was do you want to come in and make a survey exhibition at MUMA? We were working with the conventions of the exhibition and the curatorial and visual art and the conventions of dance and choreography and looking at how they could kind of mash those together. It was serendipitous in the fact that you had support from Creative Australia, the Australia Council Dance Fellowship, and you were already deep in the archive with Zoe Theodore as a creative producer. Then this invitation came in with some funding to actually commission and make work and I think you knew really quickly what you wanted to do. It was already happening.
[SL] I’ve been thinking about this work or some way of working with this material in a generative way for a couple of years. I’ve worked in this area for a long time and as I usually say it’s not because it’s new, it’s because there is a history of it and it’s a very rich history. It’s about various kinds of tension, where the interface is, where the edge of the experience is for both the performers and also for the audience. Finding how to work with those edges is hugely interesting for me, so it’s the way that we have worked together over the last five years and in the way that I’ve worked with on most projects with other people.
[HM] Could you talk about who is part of the work, which is a really essential part of the work.
[SL] The other performers are Lana Špracjer, LJ Connolly-Hiatt, Tim Harvey, Luke Fryer, Tim, Rebecca Jensen, Megan Payne and Ollie Saraviego, François Tetas did the sound. I worked with two artists as consultants. I’m always looking for different kinds of language to talk about relationships and how I work with people, because I feel like collaboration is just such a completely overused word and lost with meaning. BOf course I collaborate with all of these people and with all the performers but it’s just to point out the nuance of ways of working and obviously I am working with Hannah, as the commissioning curator, and Zoe Theodore, who was the creative producer and then a number of other producers who’ve assisted on working on this iteration, Phoebe Kelly and obviously the staff here. There are also a number of visual artists and writers whose work is in there with us, and who work in a number of different media.
[HM] Shelley, you haven’t had a conventional dance background training. To me, you are someone who has worked much more like visual artist in the studio and independently sought out the spaces of interest to present work and develop work and sought out relationships with visual artists and fashion designers and writers and architects – a whole plethora of people who are referenced in the performance exhibition. I think that desire for independence and resistance is quite central to how you’ve worked and how you continue to work and how you’ve conceived of WHEN I AM NOT THERE. The room sheet works as a scaffolding or framework to kind of acknowledge a lot of those long term relationships that Shelley has had with different other makers and thinkers and creatives. We looked at the archive and looked at documentation and went through every work that got remembered and re-remembered in different ways, but made this selection of these references from 4 decades of practice, whether they’d be Tony Clark’s paintings or a text by Robyn McKenzie that Shelley commissioned, Callum Morton’s Twister, Kathy Temin’s big, I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a unicorn snuffaluffagus and I hadn’t seen you wear it yet in this performance, this iteration.
[SL] We’ve got it on today, yeah.
[HM] Well that’s a real highlight for me. It was really important to identify and acknowledge and reference the significance of those relationships within the practice and those things sit in constant conversation with the choreography that was made as part of WHEN I AM NOT THERE and the commission. Shelley, I’d like to hear about how the eight of you made the work, because when you visit the show, you would have heard, people speaking to each other, you would have heard phrases that sort of seemed to trigger a movement or a change to a different room. There is agency for all of the performers in the work so I wondered if you’re happy to share a little bit about its development and how it exists in the space.
[SL] Well, part of the thing about saying no to a survey and going no, but yes, was recycling and going back to older work and seeing what it was about those works that were still interesting and useful and could function. I was also interested in finding various kind of systems of making and disrupting relationships between ways of approaches to moving and choreography and dance, so there’s very organised spatial tensions between repeated and learnt movement and then also all these mechanisms within them to make choices. I’m quite interested in this tension between what’s considered to be set material and improvised material. I’m very interested in the idea that, supposedly, if you’re improvising, you’re revealing something about yourself. The way that I’ve worked with the performers is this way of analysing and experiencing at the same time basically, and also to think about what it is to do this stuff – to be continually addressing that question that involves a really complex system of material. There are also practical things about schedules and making sure people have breaks and time off so that things shift around. I encourage a lot of agency with, with the other performers.
[HM] It’s a work that was also developed during COVID that’s not about COVID, so that’s interesting to talk about actually how we work together.
[SL] We began working basically with a reading list and there were a whole of different things that I was interested in that I’ve been researching and thinking about. That was how a whole lot of conversation started so and then people had to retell things to each other and so not everybody had the same information, so it was deep in the structure of making it, it was about how information is passed on too.
[HM] WHEN I AM NOT THERE began at Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne, a university art museum in Caulfield, out of town, with a pretty dedicated, not an accidental, audience. In Melbourne the arts community are very familiar with Shelley’s practice. Then the work travelled to the Art Gallery of New South Wales where it was presented downstairs, which was a very different scenario. You’re in a big state institution, multiple projects going on, heaps of school kids coming with backpacks to look at the Archies, there’s like bright green walls, it’s quite different again. And then on the other side of the country at PICA, in a space where you have danced before in the early 90s.
There’s also the opportunity to see it from the balcony and if you haven’t, I encourage you to come back and look at it from that perspective, because it’s a whole different perspective again.
[SL] I’ve chosen places often for performance where you can look from above because it’s a great way of looking at it, but I to have the horizontality is also very important for the installation too.
[HM] PICA also has the jarrah floor, which is probably the oldest floor you’ve performed on.
I think it’s somehow the floor here that grounds it rather than the ceiling. We’ve also had some interesting conversations about the way that curators work and things that we think about, and also the way that choreographers work. Not precisely about how controlling how people move through space, but about like sight lines and apertures, how you enter a space, how they layer. I’ve found that very interesting in my conversations with you.
[SL] That’s been incredibly important for me spatially, but also in terms of the narrative structure of a work. It’s not that I’m interested in narrative per say, but I’m interested in narrative structure and also how it manifests itself in painting too. My mother was a choreographer and teacher in modern dance, so I was modern dance trained, which is very unusual in Australia. But I didn’t do ballet, didn’t go to the VCA, to either the art school or the dance school, I didn’t get into either. I went to Melbourne Uni and studied art history instead, but danced all the way through that and started making work when I was about 16. I had lots of friends who were visual artists and I was looking at how they function in terms of studio practice. My mother brought over an artist named Dana Wright and I talked to her a lot when I was quite young. It was very interesting to listen to how she functioned as a solo artist, while also realising that the conversations I was having with friends who were going to art school were the kind of conversations that I was quite interested in having. These were the reasons that I started to work in gallery spaces and begin really analysing how it was possible to come to choreography by aligning or situating in in a different way and making different relationships. Here it was possible to allow people to see things in a different way whereas the set of relationships within the theatre, with music and the single point perspective and the type of narrative can set up a particular relationship. I was interested in disrupting that, but the point of view, the mutability of things and the continual resistance to there being an authoritative mode of seeing it, or a singular way, has always been really interesting for me.
[HM] That’s a way of opening up and sharing responsibility for the work.
[SL] Yes.
[HM] I want to talk for a moment about the costumes that are in there. You’re collectively wearing a kind of palette and people have commented on that, so I thought that might be a nice thing to talk about.
[SL] Well, that was also a practicality, cause we get pretty wet and sweaty and they need to be washed. So for that reasonwe have to wear something different every day. I like incorporating theatrical tropes too, so it’s like we might wear a colour and then we wear another the colour next day, so we have our colour days. There’s all the costumes that sit on the net and they’re mainly historical, there’s something there from one of the very first solos I made when I was about 20. I think before I hadn’t bothered with costumes, and then I was like that doesn’t make any sense, so why not go for a costume. My mum designed and made, which it’s a very favourite costume of mine, anyway, that’s up on the net. I’ve also worked with a lot of designers who have made costumes for me or I’ve pinched things off their sample rack. There’s some fantastic costumes that Richard Nylon made and nude suits, several nude suits, which are so ridiculous that they’re fantastic. Belinda Hellier has made lots of costumes for me, that stripey thing that I had on at the end of the day. I also repurposed a couple of other costumes of my mother’s.
[HM] There is quite a bit of humour. We were talking before when someone noticed this feeling of anxiety, foreboding, anticipation, urgency, in the music there is this accumulative heightening. There are also plenty of moments in the work where it’s deeply funny. There are conversations that you’re having that sometimes you can discern and sometimes they seem absolutely private. I also find the gaze of the performers and the dancers quite powerful in this space. Like Tim always can kind of kill me just by like staring straight through me. I’ve really noticed that this time there’s something about the conditions of this space that have allowed elements that perhaps I haven’t felt or seen so clearly in the in the other two.
[SL] Well, it’s to do with pulling focus, detail. I’m interested in how much detail you can work with in such a big space too, and draw people’s attention to different things and different scales of things too. Part of the music that was made for one particular work I had asked Frank to create a really mushy, intense film score, which didn’t necessarily correspond with what’s happening and definitely doesn’t correspond with what’s happening now, but it can just pull these things around.
[HM] Yeah, it’s evocative. So when I asked Shelley, would you like to make a survey and she said no, thanks, but I’d like to do this it was kind of a relief because the other rule of the game is no documentation. So making a performance exhibition, thinking about a choreographic practice that is embodied material.
[SL] I didn’t want any video documentation in there.
[HM] Yeah, so the challenges were thrown down because there are a number of surveys of choreographic practice, across the globe, which are quite documentation based. There is a lot of extraordinary documentation because you’ve actually always chosen to work with very impressive photographers and, and as mentioned before, the serendipity of the Creative Australia Dance Fellowship meant that the archive was quite accessible and that there was the opportunity to digitise lots of things. MUMA being a university art museum, we did a lot of publishing and so we published this book with Shelley, which is a deep dive into 4 decades of practice. It’s really complemented by the designers that you’ve worked with like Ziga Testen and Stuart Geddes. They’re the kinds of designers who read everything and they understand everything before they start working with it.
[SL] And that they’re interested, they came to rehearsals. When we were initially working, they wanted to see what I was fiddling around with.
[HM] Returning to the idea of recycling, in the choice of paper and the printing, where you can see one page through another, so they’ve kind of captured this thing about accumulation and progression that happens in an art practice. Materially, this is an example of a a very kind of good response to Shelley’s practice.
Images: Shelley Lasica, WHEN I AM NOT THERE, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2024. Photo: Dan McCabe
