tess de quincey

Tess De Quincey is a choreographer and dancer who has worked extensively in Europe, Japan and Australia as a performer, teacher and director. Trained in dance, graphics and sculpture in London and Copenhagen, she was formerly a dancer with butoh artist Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku performance group for six years [1985-91] which has provided the strongest influence on her performance work to date. Her interdisciplinary performances are based in the Body Weather philosophy and methodology founded by Min Tanaka and Mai-Juku.

Her major solo works, Movement on the Edge (1988-89), Another Dust (1989-92) IS and IS.2 (1994-95) and NERVE 9 (2001 onwards), have toured widely in both Europe and Australia while a series of performance works created over five 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 long term exchange entitled Embrace between Indian and Australian artists and is director of the Triple Alice Forum & Laboratories which bring together interdisciplinary practices of artists, scientists and thinkers in relation to the Central Desert of Australia.

Since introducing the Body Weather philosophy and methodology to Australia in 1989, De Quincey’s teaching and performance practice has had a far-reaching influence on numerous practitioners within the performing arts both here and abroad. In 2000 she formed De Quincey Co, Australia’s leading Body Weather 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 through a kilometre of riverbed in Alice Springs. The site-specific work, The Stirring, led audiences through the newly opened CarriageWorks arts centre in Sydney, and Run unfolded a gigantically scaled three ton sculptural performance engine as an inquiry into energy and motion.

De Quincey has created an extensive body of artworks both nationally and internationally in different terrains—from from city to desert—and made a series of works concerned with inhabitation and the nature of place. Besides her interdisciplinary artworks, improvisational work with musicians and visual artists, her main emphasis is on intercultural, site-specific and durational performances. (Text courtesy of the artist.)

www.dequinceyco.net