Lead artist: Tina Stefanou
Co-choreographers: Lily Potger, Alice Heyward, Celina Hage
Collaborators and Young Ensemble: Victoria Mackay, Kaz Rogers, Cooper Faull, Scarlett Jankowiak, Jade Porter, Maree Fong, Sahara Soliman, Jazmine Deng and Indigo Fossey
Live film documentation: Andrew Kaineder and Wil Normyle
Live sound documentation: Nick Steele
Poster design: Rose Williams
This work was made and witnessed on Kaurna Country.
Dance the War of Proximity, 2024, is a performance action and live filmic event featuring 10 young performers, as part of the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum. Through embodying a metaphorical nervous system and enacting certain functions, these performers integrate singing, speaking, vocalisation, and movement, drawing inspiration from nature, art, music, and popular culture.
The action serves as a self-organising system, resembling a form of poetic automaton, that moves through different sites of exhibition in Adelaide city, shedding light on various facets of coming-of-age politics. Whether delving into themes of valuation, social class, the sun, puberty, resource distribution, elderhood, or symbiosis, Dance the War of Proximity aims to forge strange solidarities within sites of collection and surveillance (including botanic gardens, zoos, and summits), questioning their historical contexts, the politics of acquisition and the gaze, using the body-voice as an instrument to explore more-than-human and more-than-bourgeoisie modes of making-sensing, which are always commoning through collective labour formations and technologies of improvisation.
This work is an extension of Hym(e)nals, a four channel video and sound work that features the artist's long engagement with a herd of elderly horses and their teenage female horse riders, currently showing in the Adelaide Biennial at AGSA.
Image Captions:
Tina Stefanou, Dance the War of Proximity, performative action and live filmic event, April 24-28th 2024, Adelaide Zoo, Mount Lofty Summit, The Adelaide Botanic Gardens, Art Gallery of South Australia, for Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Australian Art: Inner Sanctum, 5.5 hours, photography Andrew Kaineder and Wil Normyle.