Alys Longley's creative ways to fill a vacuum

We can all look fondly back on a few things from lockdown 2020. The slower life, the peace and the creative output.

Even people who didn’t consider themselves creative found themselves knitting, painting, playing music, creating Tik Tok videos and performing other such endeavours.

For people who ‘do creativity’ for a living, like Associate Professor Alys Longley from the Dance Studies Programme in Creative Arts and Industries, lockdown forced them to think outside the square if they wanted to collaborate with other artists. “Like everyone else, there were things that I loved, but also aspects that I just found incredibly hard about the lockdown, as an interdisciplinary creative practitioner.”

That’s when Alys’s thought processes stepped up a level, leading to a series of global projects in collaboration with international artist peers.

For one, she worked with DotDot Studio, set up by film studies alumni and Alys’s former student Kate Stevenson, and Kate’s partner Chris White.

“They’ve been doing digital game design and working in museum spaces that move between the in-person, exhibition and digital. Digital works co-exist alongside the material creations.”

When lockdown happened, Alys and her Chilean collaborator Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira decided to develop a three-part project to connect with artists around the world.

“We started with an analogue postal project and then a digital mapping project, which branched into a performance project with choreographer Macarena Campbell-Parra. But our plan to show the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile got more precarious because of Covid-19, so we developed a digital exhibition site with DotDot.”

In the virtual exhibition, you enter a digital world of maps and art and see your image along with whoever else is in that part of the virtual world. If you move your cursor towards someone you can talk to them. If you move away, they can’t hear you, much like if you were in an art gallery and chatting to people in different parts of the gallery. On each screen, you can enter a portal that takes you somewhere else in the world where you see another artwork or map or hear sound effects, music or poetry in different languages.

“It’s about what I’d call sociality, bringing people together from all over the world because we’d been left in a painful vacuum,” says Alys. “Online we could move around fluidly, talking to all the artists or just being there. This artwork is unique.”

When you accidentally fall into a portal and find no one in that room, technology again steps in.

“We used WhatsApp to reconnect … asking people what room they were in. This is like being in an exhibition where there are 20 rooms, and then we lose each other and find each other.”

Alys and Máximo are regular collaborators, despite her lack of Spanish and his lack of English.

“We’re both very international in our practice. So to suddenly not be able to connect was like having your arms tied behind your back. It was like, well, how can we continue?”

The first step was the bespoke artwork envelopes that formed the analogue project.

“My partner, Jeffrey Holdaway, is a watercolourist, so the envelopes were beautiful and themselves an artwork. But they also paid tribute to an essential service in the postal worker who could have a little moment of something different as they’re sorting the post.

“Each envelope goes to five artists from New Zealand, for example, to Thailand. Thailand to Berlin. Berlin to St Petersburg. St Petersburg to Montreal. Montreal to Santiago.”

The artist writes their name on the envelope once they receive it and crosses out the previous name. “Each artist had the responsibility to adapt the envelope to make it correct for their postal system. In the first iteration, some of the envelopes got lost and finally turned up five months later. When it did, it felt like a miracle!”

Each artist photographs the envelope when it arrives and again before they send it, as well as when they put it in the postbox. “We have all of this video documentation. It’s about asserting that art is an essential service in times of emergency.”

Since the first iteration, they’ve created 14 envelopes that have reached 50 artists across all continents.

As well as the envelopes and the digital maps, Alys devised another project in which cardboard and scores were sent to dancers to perform in their communities, and then video. Parts of all three projects are being collated on the digital site Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! (Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together) and planned for a major exhibition through BienalSur – the South Biennial (bienalsur.org/en).

Alys has a long-held affinity with Chile.

“I’ve always been interested in Chile because of Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra. I also loved Mexican poetry as a teenager.

At 22, she travelled alone to Brazil and Chile for a dance education conference. “I love the people, the language, the literature, the graffiti.

“I worked in Santiago in 2018, and made work at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. In 2019, I was in Chile for the Movimento Sociale – it was amazing to experience the waking up of Chile where suddenly people just refused to compromise with the neoliberal state. It was really intense and powerful to be there.”

“I love how political the Chilean people are. They really think about the basics of life every day and they fight for dignity.”

Alys – a creative writer, director, dancer, choreographer and poet – says the lockdown projects helped fill the void she felt by not being in a physical space with her dance students.

“I learned a lot about the values underpinning my teaching; how I can reach people, despite a lack of physical presence.”

Her interdisciplinary strengths are reflected in her teaching and PhD supervision, including students in mathematics and education, environment, arts and fine arts. Her students are also culturally diverse. Along with Māori, Pacific and Pākehā, she has recently had students from Colombia, UK, Taiwan, Iran, Austria and Brazil.

Alys says what we’re taught early on influences how we feel about dance and movement, but she believes dance is a human right.

“If your heart is beating and your blood is flowing, you can be dancing. Any movement can be dancing … even tapping your toe.”

Rhythm isn’t a prerequisite. “You can make your breathing a dance if you want to!

“We become conditioned, from when we’re young, that to do something we should be good at doing it or have a certain body shape or a certain level of coordination.

“Part of my work here at the University is to really question that, and say we all have the right to experience our bodies with joy, and to derive joy from the experience of moving.

“If the University recognises creativity, I think it’s a better university. We’re making space for all the different kinds of ways people think and know in the world. Intelligence isn’t just people wearing lab coats and writing books. It’s being able to express an idea in a unique way.”

Denise Montgomery