Alice Cummins is a dance artist, Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner and an internationally-qualified Registered Master Somatic Movement Educator & Therapist (ISMETA).
As an inspirational teacher, collaborator, and performer, Alice has had a thirty-year career of creating and performing improvisational pieces in Perth, in the Eastern States and internationally.
She has now returned to WA to live and, as this podcast with Alice speculates, she may be giving the final solo performance of her career in a piece titled terra on 18-20 January 2024 at the Holmes à Court Gallery, 10 Douglas Street, West Perth.
terra is “a 50min dance work informed by the knowledge of current and impending ecological loss. Erupting from an imagination placed under pressure for decades, terra invites us to feel what is happening to the earth, whilst creating something of awe and beauty.”
Alice is also an evocative writer and here are two excerpts from her online journal speaking of coming home to Perth and of the pleasure and pain of dance for a dancer who is now in her early seventies.
On returning to WA: “An unruly wildness lingers in Perth. I came home for this. Without knowing exactly, I knew I had to come home to this natural world. It’s the sky, the wind, the birds, the air itself. Something untameable I identify with lurks around. As I sit here I hear the wind in the tree outside and the raw dry sound of crows and parrots. Nothing quite like it anywhere else. It’s in my bloodstream, as familiar as anything I have known. My skin soaks it up.”
On dancing in 2023: “So much feels broken. But when I am dancing and moving with others I feel we can defy the laws written and unwritten that bind and break us. I take a breath plunge headlong into the dance and come up gasping for air and the sheer audacity of my mobile limbs. Nick Cave suggests all our lives are dangerous we just live for a-while thinking we are in control. He knows now with certainty that we don’t. Living is dangerous and the dance we are in takes us off balance all the time.”
On behalf of Fremantle Shipping News, Christine Owen recently met up with Alice Cummins to make this wonderful podcast about Alice, her career and terra.
For more information on how to see Alice perform terra look here.
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HERE’S THE PODCAST.
