Combined Artists Portfolio

Eliza Sanders and Daisy Sanders

selected works

Daisy

WOMB FOR WORLD WEEPING

A durational solo work as part of a larger season of dance works at The Liberty Theatre. With deep respect to whadjuk Noongar boodja, the beautiful country where this work has been made. Inspired by - but in reistance to - the film Mother! (2017).

to wonder at wombs and mother earth’s magnificence

a grappling with our life-creating-destroying capacity

an invitation into cyclical reckoning

we are the earth and the earth is us

this will keep going round and round

Eliza

all hOurs

all hOurs is a 24-hour performance event in public spaces uniting dance, contemporary music and video art. Three artists create/perform live for 24 hours straight, after the performance a video installation of the work remains in the footprint for the public to enjoy. It is a spectacle of stamina, a complex meditation on daily life cycles, and most importantly, a reminder that challenges cannot be overcome alone.

Daisy

CYCLES - youth dance and creative education project

Excerpts from 2022 HotHouse Company residency - with dialogue. A unique, joyful 2 weeks engaging students aged 10-18 years. A combination of Daisy's professional arts approach (creative learning through dance, focused on cycles of rest and energy and conscious community building) with Lucy's renowned menstrual empowerment work (education via music, embodiment and conversation).

Eliza

Triptych

Triptych is a series of three immersive dance theatre works exploring the nature of parent child relationships, overpopulation, memory and nurturing. They use innovative design to create transformational space.

The design and the choreography combine to create a variety of gentle immersive possabilities, giving audiences the agency to choose how they encounter the work - ranging from a traditional audience experience to up-close encounters with the work through opting to view from the floor and within the space.

There is sophistication in the thinking that underlies the creation of Fear of Eggs...To be adult, in relation to past-child-selves, creates an opening that is intriguing and satisfying to watch.’ - DANZ Magazine 2018

Daisy

NIGHT DANCING - roving performance and empowerment project

NIGHT DANCING is an outdoor roaming experience - part dance, part sound installation, part community gathering - that explores the safety of female and non-binary bodies in the street after dark. Powerfully warm-hearted, the work weaves the subtle poetry and politics of walking and witnessing into unexpected pockets of the city.

Audience are invited to experience the urban landscape anew in a moving meditation on reclamation and collective care. Doubling as a generous youth and community project, NIGHT DANCING ignites empowerment through gender neutral education / exchange about menstrual tracking. The project transcends fear, shame and division to propose a way of being together that is radically cyclical, embodied, reflective and celebratory.

Eliza

Improvisation method works

DANCE. DANCE. HAVE FEELINGS & E.motion

Dance. Dance. Have Feelings is an entirely improvised, experimental, ensemble dance work. It is the first performance artefact of a dance improvisation method Eliza has been creating in collaboration with an ensemble of artists. The method aims to create entirely improvised works that sit within a predetermined aesthetic framework. The idea is to give freedom and agency to the performers while also expressing a delicately nuanced choreographic voice.

e.motion is a 4 hour gallery performance installation which explores the nature of emotion and being seen. Eliza improvises non-stop with the intention to move from and with her emotion continuously, noticing how the audiences presence affects her desire to be seen and influences her (e)motions. The audiences is gently invited to challenge their habitual ways of viewing and responding to performance with a list of gentle provocations of how they might engage with the space, themselves and the performer. e.motion is a base concept for a work that can be translated to numerous different settings, spaces, environments. The work is both the product and an artefact of ongoing research.

View the ‘How to engage with this work’ document

HERE

Daisy

TO REST, AS WIND STIRS THE FLOODED GUM LEAVES (sound walk meditation)

"To rest, as wind stirs the flooded gum leaves" was a soundwalk through the Creary Wetlands with dancer Daisy Sanders and musicians Josten Myburgh, Furchick, Aviva Endean and Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung. Starting at 11am on October 15 2022, the walk explored creative listening to the environment with relaxed and open body and attention. The sounds of Creary Wetlands were gradually joined with the improvising and instrument-building practices of the four musicians.

Eliza

Womb Man

Womb Man is a durational dance installation piece. Over three hours a the ‘Womb Man’ grapples with her desire to nurture and to be nurtured in an increasingly unstable environment. Womb Man places the youthful female form in a strange and grotesque setting with elements that hint to sexuality, motherhood, nurturing and dependency.

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Daisy

ROOM TO REST (digital participatory work)

Room to Rest was an online, live-time, durational video and sound experience promoting rest, permission, art making and engagement from the domestic environment. It was commissioned for the digital launch of Alter State - a new Arts Centre Melbourne festival focused on disability and First Nations artists/arts practice.

Eliza

THAT WAS FRIDAY & MANAGE YOUR EXPECTATIONS - live cinema/ theatre works

That Was Friday is a three hour epic theatrical event merging dance, theatre, documentary and live-cinema. A theatrical collage of humans searching for home. Moulded from the experience of the queer, trans & culturally diverse team is a tender embrace, an exploration of what it means to search for home and belonging in a globalised world.

Part dance theatre, part live improvisation, part performative lecture. Manage Your Expectations takes the idea of the ‘trigger warning’ to its absurdist extreme using humour to question how ‘informed’ consent can really be and asking ‘How much do you really want to know?’

Created and performed by Eliza Sanders, Manage Your Expectations helps us to see the limits of the power to communicate, and our failures to say what we mean. Through a unique blend of dance, clown and absurd philosophising, performer and audience engage in a deeply imperfect exchange, musing on the influence of context, identity and personal history.

Daisy

w e a t h e r v e i n

ecological research in dance, poetry and sound

"Each time we raise our foot from the ground we are walking on sky”.

This work combines Daisy’s practice - dancing with her body’s changing pressure systems of rest and energy - together with Jo’s practice of writing as dancing and Tess’ practice of poetic vocal and sound loops woven amongst deeply felt electronic tones. This 3 way multidisciplinary exchange is the basis for live investigation and experience of simultaneous weathers in which text, dance and sound build, fade, cycle, dissipate and collect. A disruption of linearity creating clouds of nuance, where indivisible weather systems overlap and accumulate in a live experiment of response, rest and repetition.

Eliza

MOTION POTERY - Interactive Poetry Podcast

Motion Poetry (2020) is series of interactive poetry podcast: a sharing of poetry that has been written by Eliza in response to live dance. Each session is delivered with gentle guidance to enable listeners to move creatively in response. They are designed so that all bodies and abilities can engage. It is not so much about inventing beautiful ‘dances’ as it is about enabling the body to feel available to movement as you listen. To enable a different experience of hearing by activating motion.

Each episode includes some context on the history of the poems/ the context and environments of writing, a gentle body warm up and a series of provocation for responsive movement. Followed by readings of a selection of poetry compiled within a different theme

Ep 1. Gravity

Ep. 2 Association

Ep. 3 Tension

Ep.4 Intuition

Listen HERE