Consistently found it easier to work online with people previously known. This may be because there is much to figure out with the adjustments to being online and so getting to know each other articitcally and personally is not yet another thing. ...even the speaker view or pin view lacks detail and dimensionality and teh person is still so small, so knowing the person I fill in what I am missing- this is not always a good thing because maybe I am filling in incorrectly! so there have been times when I ask the dancer to demonstrate or work with a closeup camera so I can really see closely. This works. I can hold that information in my mind when we go back to a more open view. (from Conversations 2021)

I am watching the camera watching me. It becomes a wierd voyeuristic experience. I decide it isn't what I want to share with the world. I hold the camera but I don't look at it, I guess what it can see. With one hand I move the camera and with the rest of me I dance, sometimes all of me dances. I don't find out what I am making until I get home and download the videos. Then I see some things--too many things. I use the editing tools to try to find the moments I need, to make sense. I separate the sound and the colours, I filter out almost everything. But still I have too much and I leave the bewildering task. Or should I say "de wild ering?" My dance is waiting for me inside a wilderness.

I click "join" and see on the screen 6 faces I have not seen before. We agree to walk backwards away from our cameras and I see 6 bodies I have not seen before. I agree to be the first director. I have not pre-planned. I ask the 6 people to follow my directions as I speak and I see 6 responses that I would not have predicted and begin to make choices about what to do next...for me that is, in a practical sense, starting from scratch. Of course I am bringing my past into everything I do...maybe that is the tablet on which I am putting my first scratch!

Finding the dancer becomes an abstraction and so I see the material in a different way from how I saw it live, and this is proving useful. After studio rehearsals I have often looked at videos of the rehearsal to see if what we have worked on still holds my interest and what works or doesn't. When online a similar king of feedback comes from the screen in real time. (from Conversations 2021)

Not starting from scratch because we never start from scratch. The ideas come from the same source, but the actualization of it is changed. I could see that if this mode(s) of creation were part of a regular practice, it could feel more "natural". There is so much experimentation needed to get what you want because we don't have all the prior knowledge we've accumulated about dance in a theatre (or site).

We're very efficient in dance and this new way of working makes efficiency less....efficient.

Changing Choices: As soon as we set up the video, I could enter – I could see myself entering and yet I didn’t feel like I was being watched by a camera – it was the same ritual that I do when I enter the stage – I prepared myself for that. While dancing I watched the video and he watched his video, we could see ourselves and each other from an outside view, and feel ourselves inside the dance at the same time. It kind of twisted our brain membrane backwards. Connected in a very different way. (from Conversations 2021)

i feel my online performances are much different from the live performances because I can see myself during the performance in zoom, which is the platform i have performed on mostly during the pandemic.

I like this emphasis on the visual aspects, different kinds of ideas come to mind, but visual emphasis is not my first choice, i like to de-centre visual emphasis in live work, I prefer to work with flow and surprise and let whatever happens in that moment of my action be the visual mark-making.

but i'm never starting from scratch. i'm always in a progressive mode. each performance is the starting place for the next project. online or off doesn't matter, that's how i work as an artist. every project is part of a continuum, an accrual of images and desires.