SETTLING IN 

Gretel had a Solo Performance Residency at Victoria University in 2012 and 2013, in which she researched the colonial era massacre sites in Western Victoria. She made connections with several key Indigenous custodians who generously shared knowledge about this devastating history of their people and Country, and visited some sites where the atrocities occurred. She created Settling In as a response to her experience of this research, performed at Arts House as part of Dance Massive 2013. This informed her solo Presence of the Past  performed at Melaka Arts Festival, Malaysia in 2014.
IT'S MINE was a mash-up of embodied images, performed as a meditation (to loud discordant music) upon white Australians’ sense of ownership of this country. It involved skulls, a badly chalk-drawn map of 'Straya' on the floor, brokenness, passionate longing to belong, obscene gestures, jittery movement, Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock, still positions in relation to the earth, crying and an Australian flag bikini. All in 10 minutes. This was a furious piss-take of my own research into body, place, identity relationships in Australia. 
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi wurrung and neighbouring Bunurong and Boon wurrung peoples of the eastern Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands on which I live, work and dance. I pay deep respect to their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. I extend that respect to Traditional Owners of the many Countries on which I undertake my work and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I 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.