Output details

Tongues of Stone [Site Responsive Performance]

Tongues of Stone was developed between 2009 and 2011 in Perth, Western Australia through site-sensitive research with STRUT Dance and indigenous consultation with the local Noongar people. Premiered in April 2011 this work launched Perth as a Dancing City, part of the Ciudades que Danzan (CQD) Network. Fifteen dancers transformed the central city into a network of stories experienced through choreography, sound and design.

In making Tongues of Stone we sought to build a performance dramaturgy that would resonate with the history of Perth as a settler city whilst acknowledging indigenous ontologies of place and the unspoken trauma of ecological imperialism. Such an approach can be considered part of a wider movement towards a loosening of Western hegemonic practices of space through the invention of new practices that mark place differently. Led from the underground to the River, the audience's pathway followed an itinerary of lost wetlands covered over by urban development. Listening to a soundscape of multiple voices on headsets, audiences are invited to re-imagine the familiar as strange and unsettling: ‘Tongues of Stone’s strength is its ability to highlight forgotten features of the city, to make the mundane appear alien and even beautiful’ (The West Australian). In paying attention to the resonances of a history of wetlands, Tongues of Stone became a performance meditation on the invisible stories of place, reconceiving Perth through the unpossessable rhythms of nature; the flows, counterflows and currents of the city’s subterranean fluids.