Lizzie Thomson

This Place Where They Dwell (2024) by Diana Baker Smith

Four Channel 4K Video

Choreographer and Performer: Lizzie Thomson

Composer and Soprano: Jane Sheldon

Cinematographer: Nise East

Costume Design: Leah Giblin

Editor: Kate Blackmore

Sound Mix: Bob Scott

Colourist: Justin Tran

Edit Assistant: Eloise Martin-Jones

Production Assistant: Amy Prcevich

This project has been commissioned by Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest, and has been assisted by UNSW Art & Design and the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Presented at Penrith Regional Gallery June-August 2024 curated by Nina Stromqvist.

SPELLS is a series of processions directed by artist Janet Laurence, choreographed by Lizzie Thomson, and performed by Dirt Witches and Tree Venerators.

Spelling Seeds was performed at the Powerhouse Museum Ultimo as part of the Eucalyptusdom program in July 2022.

Spells for the Weather was performed at Bundanon Art Gallery as part of their ‘Weather Station’ program initiated by Artangel in January 2023. The work is agitated, disrupted, and formed by tempestarius Dimitri Kleioris.

SPELLS are cosmological and ecological - putting us into conversation with each other and the universe.

This project is a collaboration between Erin Woodbrey (USA) and Lizzie Thomson (AUS), presented in the international group exhibition Sister City - Change curated by Andrea Przygonski at Praxis ARTSPACE, Adelaide, April 7-29, 2022. Sister City - Change features collaborative artworks by 18 paired artists from Australia, Canada, India and the United States.

Erin and I met in Reykjavík, Iceland, December, 2018. We were both artists-in-residence at The Association of Icelandic Artists (SÍM). We began collaborating in 2020. We focused on ways to be present together while living in different parts of the planet, by night and day. We wrote, We talked. We sensed our different environments very slowly, at the same time, in different time zones. After some discussion about a donkey that lives in Erin’s neighbourhood, we turned to the action of crawling.

Works include two-channel video installation and a two-volume booklet. See links below.

AS ABOVE SO BELOW

Two-channel video installation

Duration 19 mins 24 sec

Unique state

https://vimeo.com/erinwoodbrey?embedded=true&source=owner_name&owner=11392430

AS SO ABOVE BELOW Vol I + II

21 x 14.8 cm each

Open edition

Volume 1 https://issuu.com/goatbysea/docs/index_1_grey_with_grey_cover_edit

Volume 2 https://issuu.com/goatbysea/docs/index_2_with_brown_cover_edit

Performance in two parts, commissioned by Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA).

Presented in the exhibition Certain Realities, curated by Michael Moran.

Working with a façade of jazz dance, Inside Inside experiments with psychic and material means of connection. Whilst staying with particular movement pathways, I seek to hone my attention to specific ‘insides’ – from the insides of my bladder and lungs, to the insides of the floor.

First Image by Jules Boag

Following Images (video stills) by Videographer Kim Ciarno

Performance work presented by ReadyMade Works for their performance program Happy Hour, curated by Adelina Larsson and Rhiannon Newton.

The work continues Lizzie’s exploration of close connections between language and dance, particularly playing with rhythmic phrasing and slippages between meaning and materiality. For the performance, Lizzie has written a queer lullaby entitled Printed Breath Slopes by Gentle Jim. This bedtime story centres on a woman named Gentle Jim and her strangely ephemeral yearnings. The text begins in English but gradually shifts into a language all of its own.

“Dusking Dumbshow is a dance that enters every moment and microbial space, dropping words that descend like snowflakes morphing into sharp, ficto-critical barbs one could miss if not paying attention.”

– Jodie McNeilly

(McNeilly’s full text is accessible on ReadyMade Work’s website at https://www.readymadeworks.com.au/writing-jodie#:~:text=Dusking%20Dumbshow%20is%20a%20dance,nor%20movement%20by%20the%20body.)

Images by Matthew Syres

This project has been presented at Critical Path and at 107 Projects as part of the NOW now Festival curated by Dharawal artist Sonya Holowell.

This project takes the form of an audio work with headphones. It offers an embodied practice for Acknowledging Country, specifically when visiting or working at Critical Path - a choreographic research centre located on Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation. This project was created in collaboration with Sonya Holowell and Melanie Herbert.

The audio file will be accessible on Critical Path’s website. Link coming soon.

This project is an initiative of Critical Path, supported by Woollahra Council and Blakdance.

Text – Lizzie Thomson

Vocals and Composition – Sonya Holowell

Recording and Mixing – Melanie Herbert

Artist Advisors – Vicki Van Hout, Matthew Doyle, Tim Bishop

With thanks to Agatha Gothe-Snape, Claire Hicks, Henrietta Baird and Romy Caen

ABRACADABRA: Idiosyncratic Dance Practices for the Soft, the Injured, and Other Light-Dependent Beings

Video and Collage

A year on from rupturing the tendon in my ankle named after Achilles, the ‘bravest and greatest warrior in Greek mythology’, I found myself working alone inside a small studio during some dark, wintry, magical weather of Iceland.

The first stage of this project was developed and presented at SÍM, in Reykjavík, Iceland. The project explores odd practices of bringing together incongruous approaches for understanding and healing the injured body.

Since the 2nd century, the word ‘abracadabra’ has been believed to have healing powers and has been used in various practices such as meditation, chants, hanging the word around one’s neck and painting it above one’s doorway to ward off illness. The word ‘anatomy’ derives from the Greek word ‘anatomia’ literally meaning ‘a cutting up’.

Closet Drama is a covert, interdisciplinary research project that takes place in multiple spaces, times and forms. Its starting point is the genre of Women’s Closet Dramas written in England between the 1500s-1700s, when plays authored by women were excluded from the theatre. In acts of defiance and ingenuity, women wrote plays that did not need the patriarchal space of the stage, but were shared instead through the non-theatrical mode of house-hold play readings. Without costumes, sets, or actors acting, these radical plays were written and performed inside closets. This domestic space becomes a politically charged site for feminist resistance, imagination, experimentation and potentiality. 

Together, we create semi-private spaces for co-writing new dramas. Like a play within a play, this writing takes place inside our own closet dramas – non-theatrical, un-advertised, scored performances with few or no audience members. The action that ensues influences the live writing of a meta play. Participants have included Brian Fuata, Angela Goh, Anna John, Rafaela Pandolfini, Rhiannon Newton, Patricia Wood and Ivey Wawn. A recent iteration included a lounge-room play reading transmitted via a Citizens Band radio at Bundanon.

This project has come out of research supported by a Responsive Residency at Critical Path in 2017.

Images by Rafaela Pandolfini

Text in image co-written by Brian Fuata and Lizzie Thomson

Hand-written bound book in multiple volumes (2016-2017)

Over the course of a year, I am transcribing The Waves by Virginia Woolf with my left hand. In an age when hand-writing is being cast aside in favour of keyboards, I take up the slow and anachronistic task of attempting to become a left-handed scrivener. Once I have completed the hand-written transcription, I will begin a second copy.

Homage to the Left comes in response to working with Mette Edvardsen in her project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, for which I memorized The Waves by Virginia Woolf. In particular it responds to reading Kristien Van den Brande as Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville.

‘The most successful reading leaves me with the impulse to write it all over again.’

- Virginia Woolf 

(After Roy De Maistre's Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919)

Live performance (2016)

Presented in Choreography and the Gallery for the 20th Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW, 2016.

TACET: Rhythmic Composition uses dance as a means of reflecting on The Future of Disappearance, curated by André Lepecki for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Thomson looks to the near future, following Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a project for which Thomson memorised The Waves by Virginia Woolf. The performance negotiates an encounter, or a harmonious battle of attention, between the rhythmic text of The Waves and her own dance practice.

Tacet (Latin for 'it is silent') is a musical direction for the voice or instrument to remain silent.

Images: Document Photography

Article by Erin Brannigan in Broadsheet Journal (45.2) http://www.cacsa.org.au/Wordpress/yoo_bigeasy_demo_package_wp/wp-content/uploads/Broadsheet/2016/45_2/45_2_Brannigan.pdf

Article by Keith Gallasch in RealTime Arts (133)

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/133/12283

4 channel HD video installation (2015)

Commissioned by Carriageworks for the screendance exhibition 24 Frames Per Second in 2015 and screened on the ABC’s Online Arts Program in 2016.

White Record deals with a limited vocabulary of jazz dance derived from Thomson’s embodied memory of her early dance education. Through sustained experimentation with repetitive actions, the performing body becomes a situation for critical inquiry and reflection upon the influence of African American aesthetics on Western dance practices and bodies.

Filmmaker – Samuel James, Composer – Kevin Lo, Additional Film Editor – Gina Thomson, Concept Consultant – Agatha Gothe-Snape, Costume - P.A.M., Project Partners: UNSW Art & Design; School of the Arts and Media at UNSW, Images - Zan Wimberley.

Link to video

Article on White Record by Jodie McNeilly in Realtime Arts:

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue127/11951

Review by Keith Gallasch in Realtime Arts:

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue128/12027

Live performance (2015)

Presented at the Spring 1883 Art Fair at the Establishment Hotel, Sydney, as part of the performance program 1 Room 13 Times curated by Mark Feary.

For Bruce is an exercise in multiple appropriations. It is part of Thomson’s ongoing inquiries into both jazz dance and the conditions surrounding the presentation of dance in visual art contexts. The work takes as its starting point Bruce Nauman’s work Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), and transposes this into ‘walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter of a hotel room’. Thomson responds particularly to Nauman’s swing of the pelvis, and further augments the walking with a vocabulary sourced from jazz dance works by Bob Fosse and Jack Cole. Thomson compares the West African notion of ‘cool’ and its concomitant masking of emotions (as discussed by scholar Robert Farris Thompson), to the postmodern dance interest in a ‘neutral doer’ and a non-expressive dancing body, and in doing so, Thomson aims to perform sexualized moves in a hotel room without being sexy.

Costume by P.A.M

Images: Rafaela Pandolfini

Critical Dialogues Journal #9 (2017)

Lizzie is the editor of the forthcoming edition of Critical Dialogues, which looks at current intersections between dance and visual art practices. Writers include Matthew Day, Susan Gibb, Angela Goh, Bhenji Ra, Daisy Sanders, Latai Taumoepeau and Ivey Wawn. Designed by Kate Nguyen. Critical Dialogues is an e-journal on dance research initiated by Critical Path.

Link to online edition: https://issuu.com/criticalpath/docs/critical_dialogues9.

Live performance (2014)

Presented in the performance program RESTAGING RESTAGING curated by Brian Fuata, Jess Olivieri and Sarah Rodigari at ALASKA Projects, Sydney, and also presented at the Giant Dwarf Theatre, Sydney.

Restaging the Hills of the Dry Grassy Jazz Dance works with a limited vocabulary of jazz dance derived from Thomson’s embodied memory of her early dance education. Through sustained experimentation with repetitive actions, the performing body becomes a situation for critical inquiry and reflection upon the influence of African American aesthetics on Western dance practices and bodies.

Material from this work became the basis for the video installation White Record (2015).

Images: Salote Tawale

A series of single channel HD video works (2015)

This series of animated text works picks up writing generated during choreographic processes, in the forms of scores, notations and rehearsal notes, and brings them back as performative artworks. The text is treated choreographically and synchronized with musical tracks.

Video stills from works:

The Dawn of Nothing

Dance of Death in Eight Scenes

4 channel HD video installation (2015)

Four lone performers listen to a track of djembe drumming that they have never heard before and attempt to play it in real time. I like to think of this work as a drum circle for losers. It follows on from White Record (#1) in its inquiry into the ethics of migrating practices across cultures.

Performed by Tim Darbyshire, Maija Hirvanen, Jane McKernan and Jarkko Partanen.

White Record #2 was developed in Stage 3 of the Australia/Finland International Exchange at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Research Project (2014 - ongoing)

Dance scholar Erin Brannigan and artists Matthew Day and Lizzie Thomson are researching intermedial experimentation between dance and visual art. This project aims to assert dance knowledges within the current and historic relationships between dance and visual art; propose new curatorial frameworks for the presentation of dance in museum and gallery contexts; and experiment with compositional methods across dance and visual art practices.

Collaborative outputs to date include a co-written paper: A Third Way – Participatory Research into Experimental Composition to be published in the forthcoming book Performing Process: Sharing Practice edited by Hetty Blades and Emma Meehan; presentations by Erin Brannigan and Lizzie Thomson at Coventry University and Roehampton University; Choreography and the Gallery curated by Erin Brannigan for the 20th Biennale of Sydney and two sharings of research at UNSW.

Images: Lizzie Thomson and Matthew Day.

Live performance presented at the Giant Dwarf Theatre in 2015 as part of my Masters in Performance at Macquarie University with supervisor Julie-Anne Long.

The Alphabet Dance is a system of multiple transmissions between an audio score, a dancer, a witness and a projected alphabetized translation. Each letter of the Roman alphabet has a corresponding choreographic entity that is used to spell out phrases.

The Alphabet Dance is in part a deconstructed reenactment of Kurt Jooss’ ballet The Green Table: A Dance of Death in Eight Scenes (1932), as I slowly spell out phrases from Jooss’ rehearsal notes and scored notations, such as ‘An Unseeing Focus’, or ‘Diagonal with Death’.

Performer – Lizzie Thomson

Witness/Translator – Angela Goh

Typography – Mitch Brown / Gang Atelier

 Images – video still Dominic Kirkwood

Live Performance (2011)

Commissioned and presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre

Panto marks the last of a series of works seeking to distance Thomson’s practice from the persistent forces of minimalist aesthetics in contemporary dance. It revolves around two scores of ‘history’ and ‘no history’, and is structured choreographically and musically by way of continuity and interruption. Panto seeks to engage with a practice of inclusivity; a saying yes to all things camp, mysterious and eccentric.

Panto was created in collaboration with members of the seniors choir Sweet Tonic and non-professional musical society Campbelltown Theatre Group.

Performers: Ryuichi Fujimura, Venettia Miller, Nalina Wait, Jasmin Sarao, Alan Davies, Sharon Lennon, Anne Claydon, Helen Lanyon, Sandra Baird, Jenni Scott, Gordon Williams, Elizabeth Williams, George Hiscocks, Cheryl Georgopoulos, Lynn Bowden, Nicki James, Josephene Anderson.

Sound: Dominic Kirkwood

Musical Direction: Annette Tesoriero

Lighting Design: Mark Dyson

Costume Assistance: Denisse Vera

Images: Heidrun Lohr

Review by Cleo Mees in Realtime Arts:

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue105/10446

Sydney Helsinki (2014-2015)

A four-stage project initiated by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, in conjunction with Zodiak Centre for New Dance, Helsinki, with Finnish artists Maija Hirvanen, Satu Herrala and Jarkko Partanen, and Australian artists Jane McKernan, Tim Darbyshire and Lizzie Thomson. The artists explore synergies, similarities and differences in their practices and artistic work. Presentations of research took place at Critical Path, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Zodiak Centre for New Dance, Dance Massive Festival Melbourne and Ice Hot Nordic Dance Platform Oslo.

http://www.idancex.com/artists

Single channel video installation (2010)

Presented at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, in Acting Auditory curated by James McDonald

Cardboard Salute is a response to the nationalist display of ‘thrusting forward’ as proclaimed in both Australia’s Coat of Arms, with its emblem of a kangaroo and emu who are both known as animals unable to walk backwards, and in the national anthem’s call for Australia to Advance.

Live Performance (2010)

Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre

In this work, Thomson continues her attempts at distancing her practice from the persistent forces of minimalist aesthetics in contemporary dance through experimentation with expressive, expansive choreographic choices and DIY set, costume and sound design. This work incorporates elements of musical theatre including tap-dancing, singing and scripted role-play. 

Images: Heidrun Lohr

Live Performance (2010)

Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre in the dance program Dance History curated by Jane McKernan.

In I am a Dancer, Thomson sets about liberating her practice from the persistent forces of minimalist aesthetics in contemporary dance through experimentation with expressive, expansive dancing and DIY set and costume design.

Performers: Matthew Day, Tim Darbyshire and Lizzie Thomson.

Images: Greg Semu

Live Performance (2009)

Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre in the dance program Folk Dancing! curated by Jane McKernan.

The Sacrifice reflects upon the Ballets Russes' historic production of The Rite of Spring (1913) from a feminist perspective. The work combines movement vocabulary derived from reconstructions of The Rite of Spring in combination with moves from the Pussy Cat Dolls’ video clip Don’t Cha.

Sound artist: Bérengère de Tarlé

Text in public places (2010 - ongoing)

This project attempts to make a minor gesture towards asserting Aboriginal ongoing presence and custodianship of this place we now call Sydney.

Since 2001, the NSW Government has supported a dual naming policy for sites of cultural significance and geographical features, but as yet not for suburbs or other localities.

The project’s title, Place of Thunder, comes from one possible translation of the name Murubora and may refer to the sound of the crashing waves at the shore of the beach. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, numerous attempts were made by European settlers to transcribe this place name into the Roman alphabet, with various spellings and translations. The current spelling in use is Maroubra.

Various objects, cement, kangaroo paw and plastic (2012)

Presented at Eastern Bloc Gallery, Sydney, 2012, Curated by Emma Price

Meditation Pyramid (Room for your head) and Stress Ball

Toothbrush

Back Scratcher

Tree

Review by Zacha Rozen: https://concreteplayground.com/sydney/event/wundercrete/

The results of sanding down two abandoned wooden kitchen chairs (2011)

Single channel HD video installation (2013)

Presented at the Dance Film Salon, Critical Path

Performer / Collaborator Chris Petro

Graphic designer Chris Petro discusses the thinking behind his clubbing move 'pasta's not Italian', which is part of an extensive repertoire of moves, each born from a story and named accordingly.