The wilderness within

Dean Walsh debriefs today's rehearsal. There have been some very arresting images arising out of the dancer's work. His ideas about where In-habit is heading is becoming clearer. Dean explains where his thoughts are at this final stage of the Bundanon residency.

When I feel the image come on I just like to let it have its space. I don’t want to claim it or own it. I sometimes just work instinctively, that’s why I like setting up parameters so that the performers have their space to perform using their imaginings. Then it comes time for me to say, "We’ve been talking about this device and appendages that inhibits, mutates or adapts the body and how does this group inhabit those inhibitions. How does this group inhabit the inhibition?" So sometimes I'm going, “god there are images coming to me", so I put it in the space other than in my head and often people start to dream with you because of the image you’ve presented, so to claim it as you own straight away inhibits people to dream into something you’ve constructed.

Apart form the straps being used straps for yoga, how do they become binds between us and nature? So Matt’s story about these bindings that inhibited his movements I felt was a really good chance to have a look at being and forcing a particular nature, another nature onto someone else’s nature. We’re force fusing these branches onto Matt, Dana and Elizabeth’s hands which is kind of provocative, which I like but I cant answer why... it’s just striking. There's a blinding conflict which looks like its growing under that image …man vs. wild, and that wilderness is not just outside, its inside ourselves. Its man going wild, so people form these survivor shows and there's approaching conflict…and so it’s like this kind of forced fusion.

Its like a scientific medical experiment gone wrong – were going to fuse our bones to the bones of trees, (an unnatural force) and then put you into the world and see how you feel. It forces adaptation. Mankind is continually increasing a forced adaptation on so many species because we’re encroaching on natural environments and the habitats of species until they are forced to adapt or mutate at a much faster rate than evolution has done before.

What is an adaptation to the wilderness? Not just the wilderness out there, but also the wilderness in each of us. Wilderness is a metaphor for emotional state of interaction, psychological interaction. It’s like the emotional weather between people, the emotional climate between people and the emotional and psychological habitats that we have to adapt all the time and potentially mutate our sense of self in order to fit in.