CHRYSA PARKINSON - THE VALUE OF DANCE AS PRACTICE

US Dancer and pedagogue Chrysa Parkinson was a special guest of the Keir Choreographic Award in 2016. Deborah Jowitt is here in conversation with Angela Conquet and Jana Percovic as part of a series of podcast called Audiostage. Produced by Bethany Atkinson-Quinton.

Chrysa Parkinson is a dancer living in Brussels and Berkeley, California. She lived in New York for many years and performed with Tere O'Connor Dance, Irene Hultman, Mia Lawrence, Jennifer Monson and Mark Dendy, among others. She began traveling to Belgium in 2000 to work on improvisational performance with Zoo/Thomas Hauert and David Zambrano. Since then she has also performed with: Veli Lehtovaara, Remy Heritier, Boris Charmatz, Andros Zins-Browne, Rosas/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jonathan Burrows, Mette Ingvartsen, Philip Gehmacher , Eszter Salomon , John Jasperse, Deborah Hay, Alix Euynadi , Meg Stuart and Joaquim Koester. She has taught in the US, Europe and Australia, and yearly at P.A.R.T.S. since 1998. Chrysa's writing and films have been published and distributed internationally. Her most recent project, The Dancer as Agent Collection, is available at Oralsite.be. Chrysa is a Professor of Dance and Director of the New Performative Practices MFA program at DOCH in Stockholm.

"As a performer I do not sign the works I participate in. I do not own them. That's all right with me. How I am comprehended in any one performance is often different from how I'm constituted as an artist. I cannot necessarily author my image onstage as a dancer, but I can author my experience by choosing what's relevant in my experience to this particular role, and then again to the next. Finding plasticity in the border between what I'm included in and what I'm made up of allows a productive gap that produces a particular, specific agency, giving and taking form. This is an ongoing, volatile practice, rife with glitches. As a performer I have the potential to consider my experience both as a realm of authorship and as a material object I place within the context of another author's work." Chrysa Parkinson, excerpt from Material of Movement and Thought, Cecilia Roos, Firework Edition No. 123, 2013

Recorded in Melbourne 2016.

This podcast is part of the Dancehouse KCA Public Program 2016.