During the SALA Festival throughout August this year I am staging a new performance work that extends my current performance art practice into exciting territory. For this work I will have a portable dance floor which can be quickly and easily moved around and set up in any number of public locations.

There are a number of venues who have agreed to host my dance floor, including Adelaide Festival Centre and Victoria Square, among others. I also plan to stage impromptu performances, outside these organised times, in other public spaces around Adelaide too.

I have enlisted the help of Steven Cybulka, a licensed builder, carpenter and artist, to design and construct the dance floor with me, including built-in lights and sound. He has experience in the area and has offered to sponsor part of the labour costs in kind.

I see this project as an exciting extension of my previous work, taking my dancing work firmly into the public realm, engaging with a larger number of complete strangers. While I have previously had individual works operate short term in public spaces, I have not had something that sustains this public engagement repeatedly and over the course of a month. The possibility of repeated encounters for people and the associated potential for challenges of perceptions and behaviour is an integral part of my practice.

I want to challenge the way we relate to people and the world around us. New connections bring new points of view and new possibilities. My hope is that witnessing or participating in this work will give people the opportunity to step outside their comfort zone temporarily. It may jolt us out of autopilot that we all find ourselves in so easily, going about our days like we always do and have done. My personal experience is that a new context for the shared activation of space provides opportunity to reconsider the way I relate to people and the world around me. Shared experiences breed empathy which I believe will make the world a better place.