Laura Burns and Liz Rosenfeld explore their divergent practices and approaches to ecologies, queer futurity and our relationship with the nonhuman. Laura shares her work with the River Wyre (Lancashire), engaging with the histories, ancestries and labour embedded in the stone, land and bodies, noting how these have their own autonomy. Liz then considers their flesh as an autonomous material, and discusses how this relationship has informed a non-binary perspective that is not explicitly linked to gender, but rather, embodiment, shifting ecologies, and performance practices.
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2019, presented in partnership with Sadler’s Wells, University of Roehampton, and the Society for Dance Research.
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Works mentioned in the talk:
Liz Rosenfeld: If you ask me what I want. I’ll tell you, I want everything
Luther Price: SODOM 1989
Liz Rosenfeld: I live in a house with a door
Liz Rosenfeld: WHITE SANDS, CRYSTAL FOXES
Laura Burns works at the intersection of writing, performance, dance and healing practices. Completing an PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, her research considers the nonhuman and human ancestors as primary collaborators, finding ways of listening to them and centering their voices in political futures. Much of her work happens on the land without a human audience; she is constantly questioning this labour and the role of nonhuman witnesses in performance.
Liz Rosenfeld works across film/video, performance and discursive writing practices. They explore questions regarding the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising practice as creative and political methodology, past and future histories and the ways in which memory is queered. Their current performance work approaches flesh as a collaborative material, and the potentiality in physical abundance and excess, specifically in regards to contemporary dance practice.
Adapted from bios written in 2019
