'Retracing steps' : an interview with choreographer and artist Tanya Voges

Tanya Voges is an Australian-based choreographer and dance artist. Over the past 5 years, Tanya has developed a number of interactive dance works inspired by concepts, and the experience, of human memory. 'Retracing Steps' is a dance theatre work about one's sense of self and its association with place, home and community. It draws on individual and collective memories of the community in which the work is made and presented. 'Retracing Steps' refers to a suite of interconnected performances that invite the audience to be co-creators in an immersive experience. The works have been developed and presented at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne; Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney; Canberra Theatre, Canberra; Movement Research, New York; and Critical Path, Sydney. In an early version of the work, Tanya would mingle with audience members before the performance and record their spoken answers to questions about their earliest memory. During the performance, audio excerpts in random order would be presented to Tanya through her iPhone's earbuds, and she would shadow or say aloud the audio feed as she heard it while improvising movement material (Figure 1). In a subsequent performance of the work, the audience and Tanya travelled some distance to the venue by bus with that excursion being part of the performance and a source of memories. When 'Retracing Steps' was further developed at Critical Path in 2014, Tanya and visual artist collaborator Kellie O'Dempsey used dance and live performance drawing to create an interactive performance environment. Tanya brings people into a space where they share something usually considered 'internal' (early memories) or private (domestic spaces) with her, and through her, with others at the show. This context is a central element of 'Retracing Steps' (and subsequent works). The 'public' or 'visible' nature of movement with, or around, or visible to others makes the experience very different to individually attempting to remember an early experience, or one's childhood house. As Tanya makes clear in the interview, that is because there is someone else, outside you, who is taking an interest (apparently) and eliciting a sense of self in relation to them, and what they are going to do or understand. Tanya's pleasure at working with these mechanisms to elicit feeling and connection is clear, as is her slight sense of surprise at how motivated audience members are to dwell in these memory spaces. There is also clearly an expectation by audience members of her interest in them as people. Tanya's desire to engage audiences as performers comes through connecting movement to memories. As we are moving all the time, the movements that 'connect' us tend to be about spaces we share with others. It is the presence (or absence) of others or things that others do, which 'move' us to memory. Tanya's 'Retracing Steps' ask us to explore how her movement is also a version of how people see and remember themselves.