With a life force to be reckoned with, the Gold Coast has snuck in to the heart of performance artist Meredith Elton and found itself a home.
A born and bred Melbournite, Meredith’s abode is now a beautiful 1950s beach house with high ceilings, old-school windows and a thriving mango tree that takes pride of place in her front yard.
She lives just a stroll from the southern Gold Coast beaches and can often be seen surfing near some of the world’s most iconic point breaks.
“While I love Melbourne and get back regularly to see family, there is something more human scale about the Gold Coast that I love; the proximity to world heritage national parks and the seriously amazing bush,” she says.
“The life force of this place is really strong; it’s definitely found its way in to my heart.
“And, right now, the city is one of the most financially supported places to be growing an arts practice. Why would I want to go anywhere else?”
As a performance artist and director of The Moving Place, Meredith creates site-responsive and community-engaged performances, most of them outdoors, because this is where she feels most connected. Growing up she spent a lot of time running and wandering the hills and bushland ‘feeling the moods and shifts, the changing lights, the clouds and winds, and movements of animals and the change of seasons’.
“I felt an unnameable longing as a child, a sense of the bigness and smallness of me that ached for expression, for a place in the scheme of things. I was also acutely aware from quite a young age of social and justice issues,” she says.
Meredith now believes that being an artist and dance movement therapist (DMT) supports all parts of her and ‘understands that they belong together, that something really essential is given life when we bring these dimensions into direct conversation and expression’.
When she dons her DMT hat, the multifaceted artist says she works therapeutically with groups and individuals one-on-one working from the understanding that the body, mind and spirit are deeply interconnected.
“Attending to our unfolding embodied experience can lead to surprising insights, renewed energy and can cultivate a deeper sense of being at home within ourselves and the world; a sense of living our deepest nature more fully in the world,” she says.
It’s her belief that in some parts of society there is a hunger for a deeper kind of connection to self and others and something larger than us, as well as a desire to bring ourselves more fully into the world, to make an impact, to be in contact.
“As a performance artist and director I am fascinated by the possibility of shaping and crafting powerful performances from the raw, moving, intimate, energetic and deeply embodied material and experiences that therapeutic practices and spaces can facilitate; with both trained and untrained dancers and performers,” she says.
Her largest body of work to date, Inherit the Wind, does just this. Meredith describes the project as ‘a creative adventure and community performance project about the weather’.
With the support of Yarn 1, the Regional Arts Development Fund , a Power Up Your Arts Mentorship, and presenting partner Bleach* Festival, she directed and facilitated the first phase of Inherit the Wind in early 2015.
This was a seven-week creative process and site responsive performance outcome exploring the wonders and worries of weather; it involved eight participants and three collaborating artists.
“From this material and experience I developed and performed a solo physical work, in continued collaboration with installation artist Mimi Dennett and musician Cye Wood, responsive to an indoor and outdoor site on the Gold Coast in June 2015,” she says.
“Artists give form, distil a poetic essence and say things about who we are and what matters.”
-
In a coup for the city’s cultural precinct, the Australia Council for the Arts has agreed to fund Meredith to develop Inherit the Wind as a larger and longer scale outdoor community engaged work to be presented at Bleach* Festival in 2017.
This next stage will expand the works to include sites and people at both ends of the Gold Coast, probably at the Kirra Hill Community and Cultural Centre and the Runaway Bay Community Centre. Meredith says while the venues are not confirmed, the next phase aimed to grow the sense of place and community that is at the heart of her work.
“Both groups will investigate outdoor sites around their respective venues. So in the north we will most likely explore sites around Coombabah Lake, along the Broadwater and in the Pine Ridge Conservation Park. On the southern end we will explore beaches and headlands and probably work in Alex Griffith Park, where I do a lot of outdoor work,” she says.
“The outdoor sites that we will explore during the 10-week community creative process are also shaped by the participants and their relationship to particular places and parks.
“The site for the final installation and performance, as part of Bleach* 2017, is not set at this stage and will be worked out once the dust settles around this year’s Bleach.”
But what Meredith is sure of is that collaboration will continue to play a large role in her creative process. As such there’s an exciting opportunity for Gold Coasters to jump on board and get involved in the next stage of Inherit the Wind.
Performance at Melaka Arts and Performance Festival 2014
Inherit the Wind, June 2015 (image: Mimi Dennett)
Inherit the Wind, June 2015 (image: Mimi Dennett)
Inherit the Wind, June 2015 (image: Mimi Dennett)
“It is a fantastic opportunity to come together with a team of multi-disciplinary artists for a powerful creative journey into the wonders and worries of weather and our rapidly changing climate,” she says.
“Be prepared to be challenged and inspired as you are guided through moving meditations, vocal and art-making explorations (indoors and out) toward the collective creation of an installation and outdoor performance. All welcome, only life experience necessary.”
She says dance, ritual and performance have always played an important and vital role in the life of cultures and communities throughout time and across the globe.
“But now, more than ever, we need ways of being together in more body, earth and feeling centred ways; expressing, sharing, moving and being moved. Performance can be a kind of social technology that can propagate publicly intimate spaces and the collective affective processes that they enable,” she says.
As for being an artist on the Gold Coast, Meredith thinks it’s a ‘fantastic time’ to be part of the city’s burgeoning cultural scene, with a lot of initiatives supporting people to stand up and make the work that they want to.
“The arts and culture team at City of Gold Coast really gets this at the moment, they are doing their darnedest to leverage the money and visibility that the pending Commonwealth Games brings to our city for the longer term viability of our arts and culture sector,” she says.
“Bleach* is also an awesome platform for showcasing and nurturing local artists alongside significant works and artists from other parts of Australia. This festival kicked off about the same time that I was emerging from PHD land and was looking to share my work with broader audiences. There is a certain degree of creative freedom making work in a city that doesn’t have its head up its own cultural a***.”
“Bleach* Festival’s championing of outdoor, site-engaged, participatory work, and its celebration of place and community, really aligns with my interests as a performance artist and director.”
-
Long term, Meredith’s dream is to have a creatively satisfying and financially self-sustaining practice as an artist, therapist and creative producer. She also plans to continue to grow, develop and deepen processes at the intersection of therapeutic and performance practices.
“I would love to work locally, nationally and internationally, with diverse communities and people all around the world.
“To be part of enabling, in my own small way, a more regenerative, loving, earth savvy and aware world – both my immediate world (including my inner world) and the world at large.
“That would be pretty cool.”
In the meantime, this April she’ll celebrate 40 years on this earth by going offline for two weeks during a celebratory trip to New Zealand with her partner.
RELATED ARTICLES
Aaron Fenech | Gold Coast’s luthier
GC Culture – Choose Your Own Adventure
Creative Gold Impresses at International Arts Market
Flipside of women’s skateboarding revealed through new lens
The post Performance Artist says city’s life force is strong appeared first on More Gold Coast.