Three Turns: A dialogue across disciplines

On 21 February 2021 at 9.00 p.m., the performance Three Turns was featured as part of a curated series of works in The Performance Arcade (PA2021), a festival that brought together live art, music and performance on Wellington’s Waterfront. In a shipping container transformed into a temporary stage, three artists: a drawer, a dancer and a musician, celebrated the immediacy of their mediums. In an hour-long performance, a dialogue across disciplines was formed, a dialogue that evolved intuitively. Over three turns, each artist took the lead, with a note, a mark and a gesture offered up as provocation – forms, actions, colours and chords followed. The sonic surface, the stage and the page merged into a single space in which the artists explored velocity, rhythm and repetition. This encounter created a place where gravity and levity pushed and pulled, space was devoured and patterns emerged, accumulated and dissipated. The collaborative performance of Three Turns allowed three artists to form a dialogue across disciplines and ask: what new knowledge can emerge from a conversation between drawing, dance and music? This report, written in the first person from the drawer’s perspective, with contributions from The Dancer/Sacha Copland and The Musician/Simon Eastwood, reflects upon the event and posits that whilst on an individual level the performance produced new drawings, new sounds and new movements that individually had value, it was the relation between the three artists and their mediums, that emerged to be the most significant aspect of the work.