Sri-text on method

VI

I’m currently based in Rotterdam, but previously I was based in New Zealand, where I grew up. I think New Zealand’s extreme geographic distance from any kind of main art center has had quite a big impact on my work. There’s a Modernist painter from New Zealand named Colin McCahon—he’s someone you learn about all through both high school. He often uses black and white in his paintings, and I always wondered if this had to do with the fact that when he was working, the only way he could gain information about what was being made overseas was through books with black and white images. Original works often never make it down to New Zealand because no one can afford to bring them there, so artists only ever see work that is mediated through books (and now the internet). So when Colin McCahon was painting the only way he got to see work was through black and white photocopies and reproductions, which I found really interesting. This is something that I’ve always played on and been aware of, that my source material is being mediated through the second hand images and text of these larger art centers.

The Stranger's House is a single piece of fabric with no seam lines, 12 metres across and 4 metres high. The fabric is a natural canvas that has been painted with black paint, using large, thick brushstrokes. The brushstrokes form an image that is abstract, and because of the use of black paint on un-primed canvas the image appears as a drawing, having no colour blocking, only outlines. There are also drops of black paint that have been roughly covered over with white paint. These cover-ups are visible when one moves close to the canvas, but disappear when the canvas is viewed from a distance, which the space the canvas is hung in enables a viewer to do. The canvas hangs about 10cm away from the wall, and is attached to the ceiling of the gallery. A chain inserted into a seam at the bottom weights the fabric and ensures that it hangs completely flat with no curves or buckles. The canvas is positioned between two doorways, meaning the viewer must walk past the work to enter and or exit the space.

The painting of this backdrop was executed by a theatre scene painter, using an A4 scan of a sketch for a theatre design by the artist Sydney Nolan. This scanned drawing was re-sized using photoshop so that it would fit the dimensions of the space once it was up-scaled in the process of transferring it to canvas and paint. A decision was made to replicate the drawing in its entirety—including the wings and floor—on the one surface, rather than just extracting the backdrop. The completed backdrop was installed using techniques identical to those that would be used in the theatre.

A few years ago, I came across a design for the stage set of the Ballet Russes' 1940s production of Icare by the Australian painter Sydney Nolan. The design itself was never realised as Serge Lifar, the director at the time, was put off by Nolan's concept of a stage set that the dancers would potentially become lost in through the use of black and white abstract patterns on both backdrop and costumes. While Nolan was hoping to explore the point at which distinctions between static art and dance might collapse, Lifar was still obsessed with the primacy of dance. Recently I was asked to make a show for a gallery in Sydney. My initial plan for a performance fell apart due to the failure of myself and the dancer I was working with to find a productive space between 'art' and 'dance'. While reflecting on this failure the Nolan design came to mind and I decided to pursue this connection. The gallery itself has a contemporary collection that is heavily represented by male artists, Nolan in particular. This also influenced the decision to take something from the practice of an iconic Australian male artist in a way that could read like the breaking and entering of a stranger's house—taking something that was not my own and pulling it into my own practice. This idea of 'breaking and entering' is reflective of how I sometimes feel as an artist who happens to be female when considering the history of art as one dominated by western males. I was also interested in the idea of a backdrop—a thing that is almost a painting, almost an object, in need of the presence of a body to activate it, to fulfil its use function, to complete it.

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This is a series of objects, each made from a single piece of marble and a single piece of white, air-dried clay. These were positioned on the walls of the gallery at varying heights: two positioned close to a corner roughly at eye level, the other close to the ground. The forms vary in size, but each lies somewhere between 40cm wide and 30cm high. The marble acts as a support for the clay, and has been cut from white marble in lines that curve in half circles, or something that looks like a wave or perhaps a stylised cloud. The edges of the marble are smooth and sharp, and each piece is positioned tightly against the wall. The clay sits on top of the marble, and mimics its contours, however, there are gaps between the marble and the clay, where the materials no longer meet. These gaps make the relationship between the clay and the marble appear rather precarious, and there are parts where the clay only just balances on the marble.

The marble forms were taken from collages that explored the translation of movement and gesture into form. The resulting shapes cut from paper resembled a sort of script or hieroglyph. These forms were scanned and turned into vector diagrams and then cut out of pieces of white marble. White, air dry clay, cut into long rectangular strips, was laid over these marble forms and left to dry. This drying process took about a week, during which time the clay shrank, pulling towards itself and away from the marble that had been acting as a support structure. Gaps opened up between the two materials, the clay only now balanced on the marble at various pressure points.

I was interested in creating objects that used a hard surface to support a soft surface, which could also be read as a soft surface mimicking a hard surface. At the same time I was writing instructions for a performance and was thinking about the motifs and ideas present in these texts—the translation and mimicry of objects and phenomena through movement that might trace an empathy between things, patterns of breathing that might be part of this process of translation, and objects and phenomena from the park surrounding the gallery the work was being made for; in particular rocks and clouds.

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A score made from 7 pieces of A3 white paper, on which a text has been photocopied. These pages are of portrait orientation, positioned side by side, horizontally across the wall, using clear plastic stationery pins. The first page carries the title of the work and so could be read as a title page. In three of the pages two bodies are identified as Dancer A and Dancer B, using the pronoun ‘she’ or the possessive form ‘her’. These bodies are described as enacting three different performances that transcribe a movement through the gallery and into the gardens outside. The last pages present instructions for breathing exercises that appear directed specifically to the viewer. These text pieces use a type face that has been interrupted by marks made in pen using proof-reading symbols, additions, and patches of black that delete portions of the text. There is also a thin line that looks like a hair in the last three pages, appearing in a slightly different position each time.

I wrote texts or directions for five different performances, or actions that could potentially take place in the gallery and surrounding gardens. These texts developed out of a site visit to the space where I spent time walking in and around the gallery and the gardens. The final texts were typeset with the help of a designer and then printed out. I discovered mistakes and changes in these print-outs and with the designer's suggestion I corrected these printouts in pen using proof-marking symbols. These were then photocopied onto A3 sheets of paper at my local photocopy shop. When I looked through the photocopies I saw that a hair belonging to the girl copying the texts had been left on the machine. This appeared as a thin black line whose position shifted slightly with each new copy. I had run out of paper and had no time to buy more, so ended up deciding to use these ‘failures’. The girl still charged me for these copies.

The ideas present in these texts had been talked over with the dancer I was working on to create a performance for the gallery. When this collaboration fell through I revisited the ideas through text. My initial idea for the performance had been based on an anecdote I heard about Colin McCahon, an iconic New Zealand modernist painter, getting lost in the gardens and being found a day later in another park with no memory of what had happened, or how he had got there. I had hoped to extract something from this anecdote by working with the dancer on a piece that explored simple ideas of walking without a set direction, the convergence of outside and inside and the border of a performance—when it might begin and end. These ideas were carried into the potential performances described in the texts, coupled with ideas influenced by an exercise described in Simone Forti’s book Handbook in Motion where Steve Paxton attempts to mimic a rock, and Merce Cunningham’s description of choreographing Beach Birds for Camera, where he explored how a rock formation changes and becomes animated through the shifting position of the person looking at it.

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A 20min film in black and white, which may be re-edited in the next three weeks to be around 30min. The first shot is of a metal sculpture on which a cockatoo sits. The camera pans around this tableau, the cockatoo following the lens of the camera. The next scene shows a male dancer slowly rotating his torso. The camera tracks his circular movement and pans back to take in the whole space, which is a black theatre box that also contains two large canvases with black shapes stamped onto them that hang from the ceiling like theatre backdrops. The rest of the video uses the camera to track the sculpture, the bird, the dancer, the backdrops and the space. Laid over the top of the video is the voice of a woman reading a French text. If you don’t understand French you might still be able to comprehend the odd word, but the rhythm may become more important than deciphering meaning and your body might acclimatise to the particular pace of the speaker. If you do speak French the text might seem a little odd, with meaning coming adrift because sentences are built around the technique of ‘clanging’ where words are associated based on sound rather than concept. At some points the movements of the dancer and certain words in the text meet through the poses of particular animals described in the text such as rat, bee and chat, concepts which are translated and enacted by the dancer through static poses.

The film originated in a letter written in 1919 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky"; a text that documents the experience of someone entering the early stages of schizophrenia. His choreography performs an abrupt inverse of traditional balletic structure by turning the movements of his dancers inward, rather than outwards. This ruptures the lines of his dancers, creating a greater relationship to the floor/the stage; this sense of physicality highlighted by his use of the stomp within the work. In order to learn this choreography a process of unlearning had to take place—the refusal of a specific tradition of movement that most of the dancers would have been instructed in since childhood. As most of the Ballet Russes' performances were never filmed, many of the original choreographies have been lost. The fact that some have remained reflects the nature of choreography to be transferred from one body to the next, its lines and forms shifting as it encounters each new performer. This letter, called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a score. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of accessing the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex– that were then filmed in a theatre space.

The piece was an exercise in translating something from one form (text) into another—in this case movement.

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Two of the objects come from an installation where I had a dancer perform. They were out on this terrace and what I wanted was to create objects that people didn’t know whether they could use or not, but did kind of engage with. One of the objects is based on a set of Yvonne Rainer stairs, so there’s a set of concrete stairs and each step is a different height. With stairs there is always a kind of rhythm: as you’re going up a set of stairs you can judge it and through the repetition you can judge how high to lift your leg. These stairs disrupt that; every step you take you have to think. I wanted them to be made out of concrete to be kind of tempting to the viewer so they’d ask, can I engage with this? Can I sit on it? There was also a volleyball that rolled around the space, which came from an Yvonne Rainer performance as well, and what was really nice was that I’d visit the gallery and some people would be using it and you’d go in and some people would be kicking around the ball and not realizing they were entering the work themselves and using these everyday…like how do you respond to a ball? You use these everyday actions. What I would want for the exhibition was can the viewer engage with it without being told, but to see…it’s about choices I guess. Maybe it’ll be different bringing the sculptures inside. Maybe it won’t set up that relationship. It’s like an intimacy with things—can you touch it, or sit on it…

I think time is a huge part of my work. My work often deals with the body and movement, so of course you then have the time span of a performance. With the works that I’m showing here, some of the sculptures have come from an installation that also included performance, and I wanted to use that performance as part of the material of this installation. So it’s about not seeing the parameters of the exhibition space as closed but rather considering that the choreography that was performed lives on in both these sculptures and the body of the dancer who executed it on site. I’m exploring the parameters of a work beyond its time allocation and presentation, which brings us back again to the notion of these ongoing sculptures that were removed from their original installation on the gallery terrace and now exist in my parents garden. The past is also an important part of my work. I often use documents or images or texts from past performances, so re-activating those documents or archives has become a way of working for me.

I have certain works, though, that are ongoing. For instance I have a couple of sculptures that, in a way, continue on in time and therefore are never finished. These particular sculptures were installed outside of a gallery and now they’re been moved to my parents garden where they sit accumulating leaves and rot on them. I feel like it’s an important part of the process.

I feel like the trace of time is more present than the trace of the human. I only say that because some of these sculptures have been sitting outside, they’ve taken on the imprint of leaves and stuff, which will be kept on them, so time is enacted. But it’s a good question, if you’re wanting a viewer to engage with their body, how can you show that it can be done?

Often with the works I make are not autonomous. I like the idea that works can shuffle around-- that you could have a work that’s three years old but it could still sit with a work that you made today, and they could have a conversation. I feel like there is a borderless quality to my work, a shuffling or assemblage or slipping. The works themselves are not fixed. For this show I’ve pulled together sculptures from three different shows, but all of the sculptures are based on the idea of the prop or the backdrop. So, they’re not really sculptures or props. They sit in limbo. They both, however, share the idea of an object that is part of a system that needs a body to complete it. In theatre, the word prop comes from the word property. A prop is only activated when a person uses it. When you’re holding the prop, it’s your property. But as soon as you pass it on to someone else then it becomes their property. I like this idea of property in relation to a shift from person to person. It’s not about the object being locked away or owned from a distance but rather about the ownership of touch and use. So this shuffling of objects through different installations and their being used in different ways allows you to consider how they have no autonomy. I thought about this idea of installing a show where different shows come together and in using a backdrop, it looks like it could be a theatre space, or a space that needs a body or the viewer to complete or activate it.

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I had a friend in school when I was about 12 whose parents were quite wealthy and collected a lot of art, particularly male painters from New Zealand. I remember going round to her house for the first time, and in the hallway they had a huge Colin McCahon painting, one of his black and white number series. Their house was super gothic. It was an old villa, really cold, really dark. And then you had this dark black and white painting with a black background and white numbers painted on to it. I think it was his “Teaching Aids” series, but I sometimes confuse it in my mind with his “Rocks in the Sky” series. We used to put our shoes underneath it when we arrived, so there was this kind of banal relationship to this painting. It acted like the backdrop to this action of taking off and putting on our shows. I remember reading that McCahon wanted to make paintings to walk past, and there is something about motion and the object that is present in my work.

V2

The New Zealand Modernist Painter

The New Zealand modernist painter Colin McCahon often painted monochrome paintings, and the rumour is that for a while the only way he got to see work from overseas was through black and white photocopies and reproductions[1]. It’s rare that interesting work makes its way down to New Zealand, so we tend to only ever experience work that is mediated through books, magazines and now more commonly through the internet. Objects, choreographies, drawings and events that occurred in traditional main art centres and have been mediated through image, text and recollection have often been used by myself as source material for sculptures and films that question history as a form that excludes, marginalises and ignores.

For The Stranger's House I worked with a theatre design for the Ballet Russes' 1940s production of Icare by the Australian modernist painter Sydney Nolan. The design itself was never realised as Serge Lifar, the director at the time, was put off by Nolan's concept of a stage set that the dancers would potentially become lost in through the use of black and white abstract patterns on both backdrop and costumes. While Nolan was hoping to explore the point at which distinctions between foreground and background, static art and dance might collapse, Lifar was still obsessed with the primacy of dance. Recently I was asked to make a show for a gallery in Sydney. My initial plan for a performance fell apart due to the failure of myself and the dancer I was working with to find a productive space between 'art' and 'dance'. While reflecting on this failure, the Nolan design came to mind and I decided to pursue this connection. The work is a painted enlargement of Nolan's original design and is positioned between two doorways, meaning the viewer must walk past the work to enter and or exit the space and because of this it acts very much like a large mural or a theatre backdrop.

The gallery itself has a contemporary collection that is heavily represented by male artists, Nolan in particular. This also influenced the decision to take something from the practice of an iconic Australian male artist in a way that could read like the breaking and entering of a stranger's house—taking something that was not my own and pulling it into my own practice. This idea of 'breaking and entering' is reflective of how I sometimes feel as an artist who happens to be female when considering the history of art as one dominated by western males. I was also interested in the idea of a backdrop—a thing that is almost a painting, almost an object, in need of the presence of a body to activate it, to fulfil its use function, to complete it.

Hair, Pastry, Tobacco[2] is a series of objects, each made from a single piece of marble and a single piece of white, air-dried clay. The marble acts as a support for the clay, and has been cut in lines that curve in half circles, and shapes that look like a waves or perhaps stylised clouds. The clay was dried while resting on the marble and now mimics its contours, however, there are gaps where because of the drying process the materials no longer meet. These gaps make the relationship between the clay and the marble appear rather precarious, and there are parts where the clay only just balances on the marble at various pressure points.

I was interested in creating objects that used a hard surface to support a soft surface, which could also be read as a soft surface mimicking a hard surface. At the same time I was writing instructions for a performance and was thinking about the motifs and ideas present in these texts—the translation and mimicry of objects and phenomena through movement that might trace an empathy between things, patterns of breathing that might be part of this process of translation, and objects and phenomena from the park surrounding the gallery the work was being made for; in particular rocks and clouds.

Rocks in The Sky is a score made from 7 pieces of A3 white paper, on which a text has been photocopied. The first page carries the title of the work and so could be read as a title page. In three of the pages two bodies are identified as Dancer A and Dancer B, using the pronoun ‘she’ or the possessive form ‘her’. These bodies are described as enacting three different performances that transcribe a movement through the gallery and into the gardens outside. The last pages present instructions for breathing exercises that appear directed specifically to the viewer.

I wrote directions for five different performances, or actions that could potentially take place in the gallery and surrounding gardens. These actions were based on an anecdote I heard about Colin McCahon getting lost in the botanical gardens, which surround the gallery, and being found a day later in another park with no memory of what had happened, or how he had got there. I extract ed something from this anecdote by exploring simple ideas of walking without a set direction, the convergence of outside and inside and the border of a performance—when it might begin and end. These ideas were carried into the potential performances described in the texts, coupled with ideas influenced by an exercise described in Simone Forti’s book "Handbook in Motion"[3] where Steve Paxton attempts to mimic a rock, and Merce Cunningham’s description of choreographing Beach Birds for Camera[4], where he explored how a rock formation changes and becomes animated through the shifting position of the person looking at it.

The Exercise Book is a film that originated in a letter written in 1919 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky"[5]: a text that documents the experience of someone entering the early stages of schizophrenia. Nijinsky’s choreography performed an abrupt inverse of traditional balletic structure by turning the movements of his dancers inward, rather than outwards. This ruptured the lines of his dancers, creating a greater relationship to the floor/the stage; this sense of physicality was highlighted by his repeated use of the stomp in The Rite of Spring6. In order to learn this choreography a process of unlearning had to take place—the refusal of a specific tradition of movement that most of the dancers would have been instructed in since childhood.

As most of the Ballet Russes' performances were never filmed, many of the original choreographies have been lost. The fact that some have remained reflects the nature of choreography to be transferred from one body to the next, its lines and forms shifting as it encounters each new performer. Nijinsky’s letter, called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a score. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of accessing the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex—that were then filmed in a theatre space.

In Actions and Remains I created a series of objects one of which was based on a set of stairs used in an Yvonne Rainer performance, where each step is a different height. Stairs have a rhythm that is repeated: as you’re moving up or down them the repetition helps you judge how high to lift your leg. These stairs disrupt that; every step you take you engages your body and your mind. These particular stairs I made out of concrete to encourage the viewer to engage with them. There was also a volleyball that rolled around the space, which came from an Yvonne Rainer performance as well. This got activated a lot by the public who would not realize they were entering the work themselves through using everyday gestures in their interaction with this object. It was about an intimacy with things—a touching, a moving with and around.

I also used performance as part of the material of Actions and Remains as a way of not seeing the parameters of the exhibition as closed but rather the performed choreography as a form that lives on in both the body of the dancer and the sculptures that now exist in my parent’s garden where they’ve taken on the imprint of leaves, moss and dirt, time being constantly enacted and imprinted onto their forms.

There is an attempt at a borderless quality to my work, a shuffling or assemblage or slipping. The works themselves are not fixed. Many of my sculptures are based on the idea of the prop or the backdrop. They sit in limbo. They both, however, share the idea of an object that is part of a system that needs a body to complete it. In theatre, the word prop comes from the word property. A prop is only activated when a person uses it. When you’re holding the prop, it’s your property. But as soon as you pass it on to someone else then it becomes their property. I like this idea of property in relation to a shift from person to person—like choreography, or stories. It’s not about the object being locked away or owned from a distance but rather about the ownership of touch and use and, in the case of dance and voice, not just the surface of touch but the body as a carrier.

I once read that McCahon wanted to make paintings to walk past. An engagement with work both visual and physical, a turning of place from the New Zealand landscape he often painted, into the moment of experience between the work and the viewer. An intense physicality and visuality at odds with the small black and white photocopies and reproductions he had to work from.

A Response

In going over the text above one becomes aware of how easy it is to lie to oneself about how one's practice is operating—it’s nice to talk about the idea of the prop in relation to the work, but in reality these objects don’t enter a rhythm of being passed on from person to person through their use, they function very much as objects situated within ideas of ownership, in the capitalist sense, within the art system. After years of putting words to forms, and sentences to gestures it becomes easy to slip into sound bites that frame a work, a practice. All of these words can distort a practice to a point, where you can no longer see it, or remember what it is, or why you make. A skin, a wall, it protects one from having to dig around.

Maybe lie is too strong a word, or perhaps being someone who enjoys gesture it’s more helpful to think of its verb form, a horizontality, a sleeping, a lolling around, and in assuming this position perhaps reaching a point of atrophy or ruin. Of course the ruin is an aesthetic all its own, a synthesis between nature and the made. The touched, and then the untouched and the touched again. The reawakened, the thing pulled from history and re-examined.

Most of the works spoken about above take as their source a fragment, a sketch, an object from the past. The touched and then the untouched becomes touched again, but never as it was; only as it has been re-imagined. All these re-imagined things are all things that have called to me, and in being called my work became a response. What is my position then as the responder? Am I left to wait for what calls? And what if one day the call was never to come? Or is my position more the responder and the caller—responding to something and calling its new form into being? It makes sense that when one is working from the position of the periphery one is used to understanding work through image, and of course these images come from a centre of power that is able to reproduce and disseminate itself. These images are also material. So if this use of archival material, images and rumour was the call that created these works, this call from a cultural centre, what happens when you move close to that centre? And what happens when you refuse that centre?

And why images and stories, and scraps already in existence, floating somewhere between the centre and the edges of history? And a particular history. These works described above coming specifically from a lineage of dance, and in particular ballet; ballet as reflecting the quintessential epitome of traditional Western aesthetic ideals, of balance harmony and line. A philosophy taken from the eye and embedded in the musculature of the dancer, the dancer as the embodiment of Western artistic thought. Having studied ballet, I often think of my body as one that has been colonised by the philosophy of form and movement at the centre of ballet.

The choreography of both Nijinsky and Nijinska took this Western practice they had been trained in and with a stomp, a turn in, a broken line brought their own cultural history into the heart of this structure, creating a tussle at the heart of their choreographies. One can take for example the Troika, a traditional Russian dance for three that translates as ‘three horses’. The choreography is made to reflect horse-like-movements—feet pawing at the ground, jumps from one foot to the other and stomping, with all positions of the feet and legs turned in and parallel. These elements of groups moving in unison, the turn in, the flat footed stomp, were all elements incorporated into the choreographies of Nijinsky and Nijinska[7], and were elements that when brought into the classical structure of ballet created choreographies that were completely modern.

Homesickness as an impetus to confront a dominant form? As expatriates living in Paris one could perhaps see both dancers turning to what reminded them of home, and in bringing elements of this to meet, on the same stage, the dominant movements of a Western philosophy a modern dance form was created. And by homesickness I don’t mean nostalgia—its more a question of what the body carries with it, what the body remembers. The stories and gestures a body brings. In my character classes when learning Russian dance, I was taught that the flat-footed stomp was a gesture taken from the planting of seeds in the ground—here an example of the appropriation and colonisation that ballet enacts on ethnographic dance. Here Nijinsky’s radical new relationship of the body to the floor, could be read as stemming from a culturally embedded memory of planting seeds.

Is it perhaps this meeting of two different forms (forms once described as the occident and the orient, the setting and the rising) that draws me to the Ballet Russes and in particular the choreographies of Nijinsky and Nijinska? This moment where exile, displacement, and migration, where moving from the periphery to the centre created a point where two forms, and quite traditional forms, tousled together, created something that still resonates today. An example of different temporalities meeting on the one plane. How does this meeting happen? Is it an alongsidedness, or an entering/extracting, what is the temperature of this meeting?

‘Maybe rejecting identity is a good thing, maybe it’s not. I’ve never been sure.’ [8]

Coming in from the margins what does one bring to the centre? And if one talks about home-sickness, what does the cure for this bring? Something close that appeases and perhaps avenges the strangeness of the almost familiar, and vaguely other.

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1 Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (2002) Ed. Bloem, M and Browne, Stedelijk Museum and Craig Potton Publishing

2 Woolfe, V (1928) Orlando: A Biography, London, Hogarth Press

3 Simone, F (1974) Handbook in Motion, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

4 Beach Birds for Camera, 1993, 28 minutes, colour. Choreography by Merce Cunningham. Directed by Elliot Caplan. Music by John Cage, Four3, http://www.veoh.com/watch/v150357902BFpGeGT

5 Nijinsky, V (Reprint edition 2006) Ed. Acocella, J The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, University of Illinois Press

6 Joffrey Ballet’s 1989 recreation of Nijinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOBXph0hP4

7 The Royal Ballet’s staging of Nijinska’s ‘Les Noces’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-5mugSiX4

8 Viber conversation with artist Luke Willis Thompson