2018 HOUSEMATE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
JAMES WELSBY & RHIANNON NEWTON
01 January 2018 - 31 December 2018
OUR 2018 HOUSEMATE ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE:
JAMES WELSBY
RHIANNON NEWTON
Over the course of the Housemate Residency Rhiannon will work through an alternative approach for the production of dance. Beginning from a desire to be a little more plant-like in everyday life and work; to be perpetually entangled with the complexities of ground-bound living, Rhiannon will, for the duration of the residency, grow and care for a continuous thread of dance. Bringing practices of care, memorization, peer-to- peer learning and sustainability to the fore, while speculating about the ways in which bodies might yet collaborate with their environments, Rhiannon hopes to develop a practice in which the body and the dance support one-another to mutually thrive. Starting with place-based research, developing root systems and knowledge specific to the site of residency, Rhiannon will work through solo practice to continuously make and care for an unending sentence of dance. This practice then continues, branching into a series of one-on- one collaborations, with the process of making and caring becoming distributed amongst a network of co-hosts. Rhiannon is delighted to be working with Megan Clune, Aodhan Madden, Lizzie Thomson and David Huggins to develop these ideas and processes.
Rhiannon Newton is an Australian dancer and choreographer. Her practice focuses on meetings of live-ness and repetition. Her recent works explore how knowledge, change and consensus emerge through processes of repeating. Rhiannon's works have been presented nationally and internationally in contexts such as Dance Massive, Brisbane Festival, WOW at Festival 2018, Firstdraft Gallery, Metro Arts, Nagib On Stage (SL), Tanzhaus Zurich (CH) and The Judson Church (USA). She has developed her practice in residencies throughout Australia, Europe and the USA and has been a part of international exchange projects in Switzerland and Eastern Europe. She works as a performer with artists such as Rosalind Crisp, Mette Edvardsen, Martin Del Amo, Paea Leach and Brooke Stamp. Rhiannon also co-facilitates First Run Sydney and in 2018 is a Dancehouse Housemate resident artist and the Create NSW Emerging Performing Artist Fellow.
ABOUT HOUSEMATE
Housemate is Dancehouse's artist-in-residence commissioning program. It supports rigorous discourse, research and wide-ranging experimentation in all movement-based forms so as to nurture new choreographic expression for new forms and contexts. The Housemate Residency is about accompanying dance artists through the entire creative process, from vision to realisation. The program offers time to explore, space to examine possibility and the financial support to bring the Resident's project to fruition. It is also Dancehouse's commitment to the future of dance in Australia and to those who re-shape and re-invent choreographic thought for bodies in movement.
The Housemate Performance Program focuses primarily on creative development leading to the presentation of a new work and formal performance season produced and presented by Dancehouse. The residency gives an independent choreographer up to 300 hours of in-kind studio space, a salary package, producing support, free access to Dancehouse's training and development programs and other outreach opportunities, capacity-building skills and office facilities. A public program accompanies the performance season, as a way of connecting audiences even more with the Housemate's thinking and practice.
