GRETEL TAYLOR
  • Home
  • About
  • Current
  • performance
    • Restless
    • A Blind Date with Blind Creek
    • Mountain to Mouth
    • Freak of nature
    • Divining Melbourne
    • Dances with Lyrebirds
    • Body of Water
    • Material Girl
    • Settling In/ It's MINE!
  • Video
    • Trespass
    • Scourge
    • Plateau
    • Hearth
    • Encroach
    • Still Landing
  • Curated projects
    • Dancing Place: Corhanwarrabul
    • Poetics of Home
    • Dancing Between Two Worlds 2019
    • Force of Nature 2018
    • Dancing Place Wyndham 2016-17
    • Curtain Call, Glenorchy 2015-16
    • Flash Frogs! 2015
    • Scarecrows of Wyndham Vale 2014
    • Southern Ngalia 2009>
  • TEACHING
  • cv

SCOURGE



Gretel Taylor   - Dance
Laki Sideris      - Video
Warren Smith - Music
 
Scourge is a two-part video work that suggests salinity and other ecological imbalances in the Murray Darling region parallel the other 'white scourge’ since colonisation, lamenting greed and insensitivity to the ecologies that have sustained millennia.  Taylor’s improvised site-responsive dance actively senses and responds to her surrounding environment in an attempt to find orientation and seek relationship, whilst she is also aware of her alterity as an Anglo Australian.  Scourge explores the complex faces and attitudes of whiteness: the suppressed grief entwined with colonial guilt, and now, of ecocide; greed; denial; longing to belong; and desperate attachment to and love of ‘our’ Australian landscapes.
 
Tactile engagement with qualities of salt is evoked through close-range images of Taylor's body immersed in sites in the Mildura region. In contrast, aerial footage of her dance gives a sense of vast context.  The scale of salinity issues is of course global – rendering 20% of the irrigated land on earth unproductive for food production (2014, International Water Management Institute). 
​
BodyPlaceProject is based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people in Corhanwarrabul/Dandenong Ranges and Narrm/Melbourne, and undertakes work in many other locations. We pay deep respect to First Nations elders past and present, who have listened to Country and danced, sung and told stories in and about their places for millennia, to share knowledge and to care for Country and people. ​
​They are the first site-specific artists!
  • Home
  • About
  • Current
  • performance
    • Restless
    • A Blind Date with Blind Creek
    • Mountain to Mouth
    • Freak of nature
    • Divining Melbourne
    • Dances with Lyrebirds
    • Body of Water
    • Material Girl
    • Settling In/ It's MINE!
  • Video
    • Trespass
    • Scourge
    • Plateau
    • Hearth
    • Encroach
    • Still Landing
  • Curated projects
    • Dancing Place: Corhanwarrabul
    • Poetics of Home
    • Dancing Between Two Worlds 2019
    • Force of Nature 2018
    • Dancing Place Wyndham 2016-17
    • Curtain Call, Glenorchy 2015-16
    • Flash Frogs! 2015
    • Scarecrows of Wyndham Vale 2014
    • Southern Ngalia 2009>
  • TEACHING
  • cv