dances of displacement

“Painting is the act of figurative displacement, dancing away from whatever is ‘there’. Painting a landscape is not to ‘pin down’ its essence, to make it still, but to trace a path which the eye can follow into the space which is tomorrow’s painting.” 

For the last few days, this has had me pondering what dances of displacement as a practice might look like. What reading dances by Contemporary Dance choreographers through a lens of displacement might look like. How thinking of their dances as traces of a path of what tomorrow’s dance might be, would change how we experience their dances today. 

Painting by Krim Benterrak.
Quote from Stephen Muecke writing about Benterrak’s painting.
Both published in Benterrak, Muecke and Roe, Reading the Country (Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1996), p.214 – 215