Know My Name

I didn't even know Phillipa Cullen, so it was quite… you know, it was sort of embarrassing, I think, to be someone who has come through dance. But then I gradually came to realise that a lot of people I had trained with had a connection to her. So some of the teachers I had as lecturers through the VCA talked to me about their connection with her, but it was sparse and a lot of my peers didn't know her. So I think it was quite a fresh start, you know, because there wasn't any history I had with her.

I've recently been making works where I feel that sometimes I do the dance on behalf of another, which is fairly impossible. But, I think I'm very interested in the real and imagined and how far you can push those things. And so in terms of the real in this situation it's about research and it's about knowledge of her. So looking at her archive and creating a new proposition or a new work that in itself becomes my archive or the archive of those that I work with.

For me, I think, to get closer to somebody you haven't met, there's a level of knowledge, but then there's all these gaps. And there's always a gap in someone's archive that you want to fill. You know, like you want to know more. You don't want to work with fiction completely, but in some ways, once I knew more, the gaps I could fill with fiction in a respectful way. I could start to think: 'well my logic is this'. So that really plays out in the process, but also in the choreography. I guess this entertaining what might have been left out of the archive.