Kultursommer Wien - Alex Bailey: Shirley Temple

For my solo dance piece entitled Shirley Temple, I will draw upon the dance experiences Ive had working for Choreographers Ian Kaler, Alix Eynaudi & Elizabeth Ward. The title shares it’s name with a non-alcoholic beverage, a child actress, singer, dancer, political activist & diplomat. Its about the things that share names & the lineage of knowledge transference through dance practice. A temple is a place of worship, a space to gather, something you enter. Shirley is a joke, Surely not?

The performance functions like a cocktail recipe.
- 1 part with the floor & work the wall, a body to slip in and out of surfaces
- 1 part ghosts & dancing demons
- 2 part humorous wiggles & the technique to drop dance material, to leave it behind
- A twist of a Rebus, a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters
- With a dash of music & passionfruit provided by Yaeji
- Served in my shapeshifting, thrift shop acquiring, human shaped glass. With an atmosphere of fun & flintiness
The result is, a dirty Shirley Temple.

I’ve been given dance knowledge & dance practice by all these aforementioned people. Elizabeth Ward showed me a way of dancing that rendered myself invisible to the audience. What Elizabeth does through dance is a type of sublimation. They turn a solid object or state into a gaseous mixture without its becoming liquid. The phenomenon is the result of vapour pressure and temperature relationships. Alix Eynaudi gave me a path to share stories through dance and central to this, an understanding of knowledge as ownership. This very careful ethical path that you don’t walk but shuffle through, like shuffling through tall grass. I dance the things I owe, the things I own and the things I know. This is the reproduction of knowledge & a means to share it as I understand it today. Ian Kaler revealed how discomfort when pursued resolutely can be a way to reach strength. To quote a friend from another world ... More disclosure than surrender.