Dr Emily Potter
University of Melbourne
Dancing in the Red Storm: Creative Research as a Response to Drought in the Murray Mallee
As discussed by other papers in this conference, the Murray Mallee in Victoria, leading to the Wimmera region of South Australia, is experiencing increasingly severe drought. In April 2007, a group of artists, musicians, dancers and writers will meet on the shores of the saline-ridden Lake Tyrrell, in the heart of Mallee country, to undertake a series of improvised collaborations and performances that will ultimately feed into a geographically diffused exhibition and a final performance in Federation Square, Melbourne. So what does this all have to do with drought in the Wimmera/Mallee?
This paper will discuss this project – tentatively titled ‘Mallee’ – as an example of creative, performance-based research that offers innovative responses to social and environmental climates, generating in the process new forms of ecological citizenship. This is the art work not as a representation or interpretation of an outside milieu, but rather as a practice and mode of ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004) that does things in a field of ecological relations. What this offers is a different strategy for water ethics (or living with water) between the usual modes (for the citizen, at least) of regulation and individual responsibility.
Email: ecpotter@unimelb.edu.au