TESS DE QUINCEY
Tess de Quincey is a choreographer and dancer who has worked extensively in Australia and Europe as a solo performer, teacher and director. Based in Japan from 1985 until 1991, she was a dancer for 6 years with butoh artist Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku performance group which has provided the strongest influence on her work in performance.
Her major solo productions MOVEMENT ON THE EDGE (1988-89), ANOTHER DUST (1989-92) IS and IS.2 (1994-95) and NERVE 9 (2001 onwards) have toured extensively in both Europe and Australia while a series of performance works done over 5 years in the ancient dry lake bed of Mungo (far western New South Wales) were the beginnings of her work in the Australian Outback. She has initiated a longterm exchange entitled EMBRACE betweeen Indian and Australian artists and is director of the TRIPLE ALICE Forum & Laboratories which brings together interdisciplinary practices of artists, scientists and thinkers in relation to the Central Desert of Australia – www.triplealice.net
Her teaching and performance practice in different terrains – from city to desert – around the world has engendered a series of works concerned with inhabitation and the nature of place. Besides her improvisational work with musicians and visual artists, her main emphasis is on intercultural, site-specific and durational performances.
Since introducing the BODYWEATHER philosophy and methodology into Australia in 1989, Tess has engendered an extensive teaching and performance practice that has had a far reaching influence on numerous practitioners within the performing arts field in both Australia and abroad. In 2000 Tess formed DE QUINCEY CO which is Australia’s leading BodyWeather company, presenting a range of dance-performance works and interactive environments in metropolitan and outback areas. Works have ranged from THE SCENT TRILOGY, a glamtrash series of interventions in nightclubs, through to the intense and intimate suite of FIVE SHORT SOLOS in tiny, linked spaces, to DICTIONARY OF ATMOSPHERES drawing audiences a kilometer through the riverbed in Alice Springs; legendary site-specific work THE STIRRING led audiences through the newly opened CarriageWorks arts centre in Sydney, and recently RUN unfolded a gigantically scaled 3 ton sculptural performance engine as an enquiry into energy and motion.
BodyWeather is the basis of her work.
Media Quotes for Tess de Quincey
embrace: GUILT FRAME
…the 40-minute journey is as mesmerising as it is inexplicably profound. …the work is elegant, simple, complex, profound, stark, elsuive – yet never daunting. It is wonderfully easy to watch and very effecting. …a wonderful journey of shared discovery. Australian Stage – James Waites, March 2008.
…together they are mesmerising. The Australian – Deborah Jones, February 2008.
The two faces in front of you, scarcely moving, are plunging through a sea of emotions… drawing you into an intense 40 minutes of observation and response… It is something to see – and feel.
The Sydney Morning Herald – Jill Sykes, February 2008.
Performance Space Highlights of 21 years
…dancer Tess de Quincey’s surreal landscapes of the mind, written by her body across the building’s cavenous performing area… de Quincey’s barely perceptible movements built to such intensity that the space felt charged with electricity and some undefinable immutability and emotion.
The Sydney Morning Herald – Angela Bennie, November 2004.
Nerve 9
…Tess de Quincey is a formidable artist… her intense, many-layered, intricately worked creations where the body, decentred and edgey, negotiates the mutated, arcane landscape of contemporary culture… With Nerve 9 De Quincey and her collaborators have created an epitaph for our time.
The Age (Melbourne) – Vicki Fairfax, February 2002.
Tess de Quincey – extracts from solo reviews
Nerve 9
November 2005, Melbourne Stage – Hilary Crampton: Who are we, what are we without the gift of speech? How does speech become language? And how does language function as a tool of both power and oppression? All these questions emerge out of Tess de Quincey’s Nerve 9. This is an extraordinary performance… a powerful work built on serious intellectual content. …awakening those feelings of shared but unacknowedged experiences by which we are able to empathise with others.
November 2005, The Age – Chloe Smethurst: …the work goes beyond the realm of the literal into the secret centre of being. Ultimately, Nerve 9 transcends language to present a vision of the subconscious, pre-language experiences of women.
October 2005, The Sydney Morning Herald – Jill Sykes: Nerve 9 is the peak of her incisive creativity. Nerve 9 should not be missed.
September 2005, The Australian – Rita Clarke: It’s a film noire fusion for the eye, a tapestry for the ear and a banquet for the imagination. De Quincey’s poetic creation is more like Blake than Wordsworth. This is a work of art, painstakinghly put together and magnetically interesting.
February 2002, The Age (Melbourne) – Vicki Fairfax: … Tess de Quincey is a formidable artist… her intense, many-layered, intricately worked creations where the body, decentred and edgey, negotiates the mutated, arcane landscape of contemporary culture… With Nerve 9 De Quincey and her collaborators have created an epitaph for our time.
August-September 2001, Realtime 44 – Eleanor Brickhill: …Stewart’s shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey’s enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty… has a depth and lucidity that is immensely readable and challenging… the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.
June 2001, The Australian – Deborah Jones: … a piece of such exquisite refinement… de Quincey and her collaborators in vision, sound, light and text (this is a true multimedia work) were on another plane altogether… intensely gripping… this sombre, challenging piece.
May 2001, The Sydney Morning Herald – Jill Sykes: Engrossing kaleidoscope of dance, sight and sound… … an inspiringly integrated multi-art form presentation… an engrossing, ever-changing sequence of moods in dance, visuals and sound. … this spare yet richly layered presentation. …which makes this enigmatic way of seeing and hearing an exhilarating trigger to the imaginative senses.
Performance Space Highlights of 21 years
November 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald – Angela Bennie: …dancer Tess de Quincey’s surreal landscapes of the mind, written by her body across the building’s carenous performing area… de Quincey’s barely perceptible movements built to such intensity that the space felt charged with electricity and some undefinable immutability and emotion.
Butoh Product #2 – Nerve
June-July 1999, Realtime – Edward Scheer: …we have the bare material of language on display… a more powerful performance presence is hard to imagine and even without locomotive movment the pulses of the body’s capacities for movement are in evidence.
Document
June 1997, Alice Springs News – Kieran Finane: This was a performance of exceptional potency.
September 1994, Kölner Stadtanzeiger (Cologne): …working in opposition to conventional choreography and all traditions of bodily expression with emphasis, determination and also anger… to retrieve the directness of movement that usually fails at the barriers of stiffened dance grammar. Even more radical… she deconstructed evey banal, familiar gesture. The self evidence in her repose, rhythms of moving and even the eye contact were left frozen by de Quincey, almost like a cocoon.
is
April 1994, The Australian – William Shoubridge: An hour of masterly drawn movement and image where the pen never leaves the page… She has a presence and hieratic solemnity to her dancing that gives it the weight of a sibylline utterance, yet the work has a cool Euclidean logic in its geometry and layout… a body acted upon by deep and mysterious forces and her commanding expression resonates with those forces. It’s like dancing turned inside out, if you like, and it is rarely seen on an Australian stage.
Another Dust
May 1990, Art & Text – Sarah Miller: Rigorously anti-humanistic in conception, de Quincey presented an alien body, the body as phenomena. The performer moving in space apppears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns. The act of performance, the experience, becomes primary. This chameleon body, perceived and rendered as a site of desire, displacement and fluctuation… The spectator too is required to relinquish his or her everyday mode of interpreting experience, for the performance through its rejection of representation and logical sequences in favour of the sensorial body and of a perceptual space, arouses and brings into view that which we commonly do not see.
Feb 1990, Sydney Morning Herald – Jill Sykes: Mysterious and dramatic, grotesque and beautiful, Tess de Quincey’s latest solo has the power to draw her audience into another world. Its intensity is absolutely gripping, its interpretative depth a rich mine of possibilities… Another Dust is a theatrical experience which should not be missed.
Nov 1989, Information (Copenhagen) – Monna Dithmer: An ‘inbetween’ space arises, where personality, humanity and individuality lie and pulsate in an indefinite state…it is total deliverance which is danced. An uncompromising surrender which Tess de Quincey in a fascinating way manages to maintain throughtout the entire solo. A beautiful example of a Butoh dance which does not become an empty purely aesthetic style, but is a highly personal observation of Butoh’s expression and form. After a dance experience like this we can only ask for ‘another’.
Movement on the Edge
Oct 1988, Ballett-Journal Das Tanzarchiv (Cologne) – Kurt Peters: Everything was endless with a maximum of intensity and a minimum of movement. There cannot be less movement to tell such a complex tragedy without words. Tess de Quincey was so powerful that she needed neither the light changes not the wire of the set for her ‘Movement on the Edge’.
