More than bums on seats: Branch Nebula : choreographing the audience

Branch Nebula have been making socially and politically engaged interdisciplinary performance work since 1999. On the website under ABOUT: Co-Artistic Director, Mirabelle Wouters reveals her unconventional upbringing in Belgium and her discovery of jazz ballet, accompanied by retro photos from babyhood to luminous young dancer. Co-Artistic Director, Lee Wilson on the other hand (revealing much more perhaps) offers as his entry, ‘Still needs to write his blurb.’ There is however a photo of a toddler striding along a concrete suburban footpath, wearing oversized shorts (or is it a skirt?) with an EH Holden station wagon parked on the grass verge across the street.
Colleague Julie-Anne Long talks with Wouters and Wilson about their upcoming work for the Keir Choreographic Award with Wilson having no problem with words in conversation. When Long sits down to reconstruct this conversation with the artists, multiple voices emerge, not all articulated in words. This essay explores these multiple voices in both form and content by layering private processes and choreographic concerns from the transcript in relation to the public realm of critics and performance scholars. Long’s own contribution moves back and forth between the plurality of views, always with the artists voices at the centre.