Danger/Dancer
Sonya Holowell and James Hazel

Firstdraft Writers Program

Led by Sonya Holowell and James Hazel, Danger/Dancer began as an artistic inquiry into geocultural sites in Australia holding fraught pasts, presents and futures; places whose voices have been threatened by gentrification and other agendas of erasure and control.

In 2020, we spent time with and responded to Bidura Children’s Court, the Sirius building and Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, in consultation with artist and friend Timothy Gray. As we worked our way through archives, sounds, sites, and stories, our responses took on a naturally tangential quality, informed by our individual (and embodied) resonances and reactions. These responses, not bound to any particular medium or discipline, were housed online in an anarchive at dangerdancer.com.

Currently, we’re moving into a more expanded conception of what Danger/Dancer can be. Having identified the common tendency to neatly define projects, set distinct parameters and ascribe ‘rational’, ‘logical’ ‘meaning’ (read familiarity); we’re curious as to how broad an umbrella a thing like Danger/Dancer can be. Perhaps abandoning the question of ‘what is it’, in favour of some more relevant framing. Or how a thing can have its own material affordances without us attempting to frame it, at all? An emergent (in)coherence, with its own rationale and legitimacy of being.

How is Danger/Dancer distinct from other… projects? How do we determine what goes under its banner, and what doesn’t? What belongs or doesn’t belong, and why? And what are the ethics that emerge from, and are situated within such an approach? What are the extended potentials of site, body and archive? Can Danger/Dancer function as a type of arena?

We’re staying with the divergence. And maybe also the ‘dangerous’, as we explore and expose things that we haven’t until this point in our practices. Tending to those dormant parts or neglected facets. In pursuing this, we’re not interested in a contrived aesthetic of transgression or renewal (read: gentrification). Rather, we pursue the exhilaration of sincerity and play; of the risk and reward of acknowledging the needs of the personal and the commons. A process led by an ethics of ‘feeling,’ with unknown and surprising aesthetic manifestations.

During the month of May, Sonya will be working on writing for an upcoming multimedia work, and ways of adapting text for video. James will be advising her on this, while pursuing his own work Lad Luxe.

related