territory

A NOTE FROM THE CHOREOGRAPHER

The seed of this work was planted in 2015, whilst reading an in-flight magazine on a budget airline flight between residencies in France and Germany.  There was a small article about micro-nations - disused oil rigs in the middle of the ocean, tiny “unclaimed” islands, even an ordinary house on a suburban block. People stake claim to these locations, and fully invest in the imagining of them as sovereign, autonomous nation-states, complete with passports, currency, laws and governments. They are a fantasy on a large scale for one or a few people that sparked a question I could not shake: what if I did this to my body? I became fascinated with the idea that I could, using the language and tenets of Western International Law, apply a set of agreed upon rules to my body, as a landmass, and claim it as a sovereign country. 

I began developing the idea as a solo work, in a forest residency far from home. But bringing it back to this country - not just to so-called Australia, but to this place, the desert - changed everything. There was a huge shift in what needed to be considered, and indeed what I wanted to say, make and share when I came back to a place where sovereignty - as both a word and concept - carries a different weight entirely. What had been playful and absurd in the hands of micro-nation hobbyists suddenly sat inside the scope of a much larger and more serious conversation, because their games of make-believe are, after all, born from the same acts of claiming and conquering that have shaped this continent's history. This was not a story I could tell alone, nor one that should be held only by a body descended from white settlers.

For a decade I searched for the right form - wrestling with language, chasing the perfect mode of delivery, terrified of getting it wrong or being trapped by words and their meanings whilst wanting to unflinchingly and sensitively offer these ideas up to be witnessed.  At a crossroads in 2021, a friend and fellow artist gave me an important reminder: if the body is your language, if dance is the most powerful instrument you have for offering an otherwise to realities we think we already know, then let that be the vehicle. Your job is not to explain, it's to offer a perspective people haven't considered yet, and make space for reflection.

So I stopped trying to write the essay or deliver the monologue. Instead, I asked other bodies, with other histories, to reckon with these questions alongside me. I am forever indebted to the brave, intelligent and truly remarkable Aboriginal, Māori, Indian, Norfolk, Filipino, migrant and white "Australian" collaborators who brought their knowledge, lived experience and activism into this work: Katina, Bella, Erica, Ping, Maddy, Samakshi, Luci, Declan, Serina, Jen, Anna, Karlia and Amala. Thank you for trusting me, pushing me, and dancing beside me.

Eleven years after that plane ride, territory is the work we have made together - one I am immensely proud of and continually humbled by. I believe we cannot move toward more just, caring and abundant futures without reckoning honestly with the truths that brought us here: the violence and dispossession of colonialism, the absurdity of the status quo, what it is to move through the world as a female-presenting person, the desire to belong, and our shared, undeniable need to be connected  to each other, and to the land we exist on. 

It may seem an impossible task for an abstract, fleeting work of contemporary dance to achieve, but in our bodies we carry the knowledge and potential needed to continue, and it is also in these fleshy forms that we stand at the coalface of change. So thank you for bringing your bodies here to meet ours, for bearing witness, and for joining us on this small but mighty journey.

- Frankie Snowdon