Dancing with Rest – A New Approach to Performance Making by Daisy Sanders

Rest.
Resilience.
Response.

Practice and performance-making at health and sector edges.

How does an independent artist create and present work while living with chronic health conditions? It takes 10 years.

In 2014 I was a fresh faced, newly WAAPA-graduated dance artist. I threw myself into every opportunity and connected with artists of other disciplines obsessively. While waltzing around Boorloo / Perth in my Doc Marten boots I met the local legend Joe Paradise Lui and he became the sound and lighting designer for my first full length work Status Room at The Blue Room Theatre. Less than a year after the show, in July 2015, I was sleeping 18 hours a day, had lost 15kg and could barely walk for 5 minutes. So started my decade long journey of building an arts practice and career in response to the deep sensitivity of my body and the steadily ailing conditions of the independent arts sector.

Exactly 10 years on from Status Room, my work A Resting Mess is premiering this August at City of Fremantle’s 10 Nights in Port festival. It’s hard to encapsulate all that this project is. Part dance, part live sound, part immersive installation and tactile adventure, it offers a healing process, a community space and a visceral, physical, big-hearted performance. The artists move through overflowing piles of household items and recyclables. They are wildly playful, generous, warm and tenderly reflective. The work meditates on the chaos and exhaustion of our bodies and our world, on our resilience to carry on, clean up or surrender to mess, to lean toward one another, to help, to hold, to love, to wait, to act, to listen, to rest.

The work was borne in direct response to the depth of my health struggle with endometriosis and chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgic encephalomyelitis). In 2016, I participated in Strange Attractor interdisciplinary arts lab led by Adelina Larsson and David Pledger. I lay on the floor of Canberra Contemporary Arts Space over 10 days, danced when I could (even if only momentarily), stopped as soon as I needed (to practise the deepening of rest) and wrote poetic and political reflections across the walls.

In 2017 I repeated this process at ECU’s Spectrum Project Space as part of my Honours project called “…the edges of resting and going…” that stretched over two years. Gradually, without warning, my arts practice began to emerge.

In one sense, I ‘dance with rest’ as a method for listening closely to my nervous system while moving. I can dial the intensity of movement up and down in response to the details I notice very closely in my changing energy and emotions. This movement approach is informed by my experience of somatic practices The Feldenkrais Method (teacher Molly Tipping), Alexander Technique (teacher Glenn Swift) and Body Mind Centering (learned during my 6 years as company artist with Sensorium Theatre). It is a spontaneous movement process through which I incrementally extended my capacity to keep dancing and thus recovered from chronic fatigue. I teach this approach to others and the awareness and vitality it brings to their dancing bodies is evident.

In another sense ‘dancing with rest’ is my commitment to performance presence and live decision-making in dance improvisation. This is powerfully influenced by Dr. Jo Pollitt, my enduring mentor, friend and collaborator since she directed Status Room in 2014. Being highly attentive, feeling expressively and allowing a real and full response to pass through my moving body in every moment leads to unexpected range in dancing and performing.

However, after my 2015 surgery and health collapse, it took a long time for my body to tolerate the adrenaline of dancing and performing. So in the interim years I participated generously in arts advocacy and sector engagement initiatives. Formative experiences included FLOCK (a monthly interdisciplinary practice event for independent artists that I founded with Alex Desebrock and Elizabeth Pedler 2018-2021) and leading a WA Chamber of the Arts research project by hosting tough conversations about the (un)sustainability of independent artist careers. I was a core artist for Performing Lines WA’s Kolyang Hub 2020-21 and became a member of its 2022 artist advisory. Just as this platform had powerful creative and connective impacts for the WA arts sector, it provided me with invaluable opportunities to further integrate rest into my advocacy and artistry.

During Kolyang I offered everyday actions, small body rituals and rest-full ways of talking and being together that became woven into the Hub’s culture and began to normalise rest in local artist vernacular. I also consolidated my skills in facilitating conversations about artist wellbeing and accessibility. ‘Dancing with rest’ is thus also a philosophy which allows me to create safe environments for addressing difficult issues, particularly burn-out, financial strain and the other significant pressures that independent artists face. Rest is not just the topic but the intentional, embodied way of holding space that Kolyang Hub empowered me to refine.

This also applies to my creative leadership in the studio. Kolyang provided free space, indie artist income and expected no outcomes. I was able to invite a wide network of mid-career artists, highly skilled and ranging in background, artform and sensibility into open-ended sessions of my creative practice. The Kolyang Hub model is unparalleled and was undeniably formative for my artistic approach and projects. By leading nuanced rest research with diverse artists I learned to sense and nurture the tone and cohesion of the room. With rest as the felt and full-body undercurrent of all activities, I honed my skill in activating spontaneous community and palpably igniting play, creative spaciousness and deeply authentic relationality. These qualities characterise A Resting Mess.

Ultimately I have come to understand my independent rest-centred arts practice as an eternally running river, something I must tend to outside of funded opportunities then adapt for whatever resources appear. One of the reasons A Resting Mess is such a multifaceted project is that I have been enduringly resourceful in developing it in many incidental platforms such as Kolyang Hub. I have worked on the project in research, residency, creative laboratory, community arts, school and exploratory festival contexts. It has almost never been funded by more than stipends or free venue provision and has almost always had the doors wide open for audience to encounter the work as both performance-in-development and a living, unpredictably unfolding, shared creative space.

In 2023 my commitment to adapting A Resting Mess (in order to sustain its growth) culminated with living in Aotearoa / New Zealand. I was University of Otago’s 18th Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance – the 3rd Australian artist to undertake the position. Otepoti / Dunedin’s small but vibrant creative community embraced me wholeheartedly. I was able to translate my ‘dancing-with-rest’ approach into community classes for all dance levels and abilities, including people with fatigue, long covid and chronic illness. I lead school workshops exploring the interconnected sustainability of our bodies and our planet through movement and creative writing. I inspired Otago University’s future teachers to redefine primary school dance as a powerful place for wellbeing, permission and self awareness. I delighted in drawing together all the friends, connections and recyclable materials I’d managed to accumulate over 6 months to present a community-focused version of A Resting Mess. It concluded with a shared vegan meal and detailed waste clean up event led by powerful Tangata Whenua Fiona Clements.

Having refined and celebrated the research and engagement aspects of my passion project, I was ready to return home, reconnect with my finest WA artist collaborators and realise A Resting Mess at full-scale festival presentation. As the opening approaches, I’m looking back at the durational and unconventional resourcing that has gradually brought this work into being. I include a table to acknowledge the vast range of places and the creative people of great number and calibre who have enabled and shaped A Resting Mess. (See downloadable pdf table).

In summary, I got unbearably sick. So, I responded by developing a professional artistic approach that means I can dance myself well, lead spaces and conversations with great consciousness and care and sustain long-form creative gestation in a poorly resourced arts landscape.

Why has A Resting Mess taken 8 years to arrive? Because my body needed that long to re-establish health. Because the creative process cannot be rushed: the work revealed to me what was needed slowly, gradually, and I listened. Because it is difficult to align this kind of sustained and incidental creative rhythm with traditional arts grant and presentation timelines. All of these things required me to go gently, to work by weaving, traversing and adapting and to just keep ‘dancing with rest’.