Dancing the cosmos

Laura Boynes, an award-winning independent dance artist based in Western Australia, is one of 12 Australian artists commissioned to create original work for this year’s Perth Festival. She will present Equations of a Falling Body, which explores the unpredictability of our contemporary world, and the distant forces beyond our control that intervene in our everyday lives.

“I think of the work as ranging between macro and micro issues, and when I think macro, I move outside the planet and the climate and into the atmosphere and universe,” Boynes explained during our interview, as we sat on the front porch of her family home in Perth.

This is fitting in a festival in which there are many references to the cosmos and our relationship to it as humans. The theme of the Festival is Djinda, which means stars in the language of the traditional custodians of Boorloo/Perth.

Boynes, who has received two Australian Dance Awards for her choreographic work, is primarily interested in creating within the hybrid spheres of dance, theatre, audiovisual elements and materials. She grew up in Canberra in a creative family – both her parents, her brother and her grandmother being visual artists – with this exposure to visual forms being a profound influence on the way she goes about creating choreographic work.

She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Dance (Honours) at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2007, after which she spent several years making dance films.

“My live work still incorporates my passion for film,” she says. “I’m always thinking about the perspectives of scenes or images that I’m creating in a cinematic way.”

As well as choreographing, Boynes features prominently as a performer in the Perth dance scene; she collaborates with artists who have lived experience of disability, and offers movement direction for theatre companies.

In 2013 she made her first full-length works: Hanging Space, created with Michael Whaites for LINK Dance Company, and Look the Other Way, created with Cadi McCarthy for Buzz Dance Theatre, the latter being a company with which Boynes had performed as a dancer since 2009.

A driving force behind her creativity is the importance she places on strong collaborative relationships. In 2015, she formed PRAXIS with her brother Alexander Boynes (visual artist) and her partner Tristen Parr (cellist and composer), a collective that explores the links between their individual artistic practices and which has created exciting multidisciplinary works.

A fascination with how global events (political, social and environmental) interact with our individual lives as humans is a recurring theme in Boynes’s works. Equations of a Falling Body was developed through a SEED Residency with STRUT Dance (Perth’s National Choreographic Centre) during the height of the pandemic in 2020. In direct response to the unpredictable state of the world, Boynes chose to work with in-ear technology, a live feed through which she can talk directly to the performers: Ella-Rose Trew, Timothy Green and James O’Hara. The three improvise within a scored structure, responding to Boynes’s voice as she guides them through physical scores related to current events. This means that the work is quite literally choreographed live, with the performers being equally surprised and supported, spurred on by the thrill of the unknown. As Boynes explains, creating the work in real time was important thematically:

“During the time we have been creating this work, we’ve had a global pandemic, wars, political uprisings, massive climate disasters… and so it feels like the world has exponentially changed, and so that’s why the liveness [of the choreography] is so important because we can keep the work up to date in the now.”

Boynes also finds that the use of in-ear technology brings the magic of the rehearsal room – a non-judgemental, playful and explorative space – to the stage.

The performers themselves are pivotal in creating the atmosphere of each scene; many of the technical elements are handheld and controlled by them. They utilise a variety of materials – head torches, fans, spray bottles that create bursts of water mist – to create cinematic images and moments of illusion that build and fall away before our eyes. Boynes is particularly interested in this lo-fi quality, where none of the craft is hidden.

With the title itself – Equations of a Falling Body – being a metaphor for our rapidly declining planet, it is inevitable that the work has a sense of overwhelming grief at times. However, Boynes tackles these topics with humour and sensitivity, and hopes that audiences will leave the theatre feeling encouraged by the power of human resilience and togetherness, and our power to change things for the better.    

The Perth Festival runs from February 21 to 26.

All photos are of 'Equations of a Falling Body'. 

 This article first appeared in the current Jan/Feb/Mar issue of 'Dance Australia'. Print is for keeps! Buy your copy from your favourite dance retailer or on-line here or here.