Interview #157 — Amrita Hepi

by Nithya Nagarajan

Amrita Hepi (b. 1989, Townsville of Bundjulung/Ngapuhi territories) is an award winning artist working with dance and choreography through video, the social function of performance spaces, installation and objects.

Using hybridity and the extension of choreographic or performative practices, Hepi creates work that considers the body’s relationship to personal histories and the archive. Her practice engages in a wide range of themes including the ourbouros, the ‘itness’ of a thing, violence, magpies, magic, touch, doom, spectacle, the idea of ‘make-believe’ and the uncanny.

Amrita spoke to Nithya about monuments, beginnings, and the weight of conversations to come.

I’ve known you for a couple years now and you were one of the very first friends I made when I moved here. The first time we met, you invited me into your studio and you were talking to me about the ideas your were working on and your artistic inquiry for a new work titled Monumental. I was reminded of some of your ideas recently as I was working my way through Dean Cross’ Monuments at 4A where he arranges a grid with handfuls of white ochre with permissions from Elders of Ngunnawal/Ngambri country where the artist grew up. Much of the white ochre is wrapped in gold leaf on the gallery floor and there’s a real thing for each year of colonisation of Australia. It immediately reoriented time and space in a physical sense and I was reflecting on your work Monumental and the layers of meaning you were working through in the contest of public space. Where are you with the making of Monumental now?

When I was first making the work Monumental, I was thinking about the symbolic nature of monuments and it wasn’t to necessarily rail against what was being built solely—solely, I’ll say that—it was to think about where we were placing these exaggerated figures in space and how they change. Monuments are dialectical and they seep into our periphery. When I was thinking about it, they’re like the horizon line in a painting over and over again because you see where that line is in a painting and it changes over and over again. Monuments are steadfast informants of space - grand, expansive, looming - and they’re always being built, but they are also always being rinsed out by retrospect, hindsight, inertia, disrepair, rain. I had this almost hysterical obsession with them. On the one hand, I was quite intrigued by their lack of originality in Australia and on the other hand, I was fascinated by scale. I decided to make Monumental as a way to channel all of this intrigue…

After what happened with the Black Lives Matter resurgence, and monuments being ripped down, I have to revisit the way the work is framed. I had shot the work for Monumental in the January prior—where this monument is serenaded, danced around, built up and then replaced by dancing bodies and the stories that surround them. At first, I made the joke to you and my producer that I was a psychic… but despite this renewed interest, my relationship to monuments and public space and the questions remain: who gets to be monumentalised? how can we make monuments that keep up in perpetuity with the purpose of itself? is this too much of a demand?

Tell us about the shape of the final work in your mind’s eye.

The work itself is a performance and it will be a performance in Gertrude Contemporary in February of next year and we’re hopefully in track for it to happen as planned. There will be two photographs—one photograph is of the monument and the dancers. And the other is of the destroyed pieces of the monument and my body. The monument itself will exist in a certain capacity in the space and a video work accompanies the install. The opening will have ten dancers perform and the closing will have a speech/song that I close the exhibition with.

The liberty of having time means you can make as many tweaks as you want and be with the work a little bit longer, but it’s ready to part with me for now.

Immediately before the COVID madness hit on scale in Victoria where you are in one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, Carriageworks in Sydney hosted the Keir choreographic awards and you were here on Gadigal country where you won the peoples’ choice awards—two years in a row now? What was your new work for Keir?

I made the scratchings of a new solo, Rinse, for Keir. Rinse is the beginning of a work and it’s funny because Rinse was really about what makes the beginning so intoxicating. There’s this persistent lust for an initial thrill of anything - a romance, a country, a canon of something when it begins—people hinge on to that. Like, this is the start of Australia, this is the start of Indigenous history, and so the work looks at the beginnings of the transmission of myself and public fascination with beginnings, middle, endings—this seduction that we have with a singular narrative i.e. there’s only one consistent mode of being. This possibly sounds pretty theoretical but it’s the first work I’ve made on myself and it explored my own auto-didacticism around myself. A lot of dancers do that you know—it starts with one thing, goes on to another thing and transmutes to another thing. So it started very much in the beginning, there is emptiness and emptiness shouldn’t be confused with nothingness. It’s also the first time I spoke and used text so strongly and Rinse is something I want to return to because it was cut short so abruptly as the last work I made before lockdown. It was my last public performance.

If I remember correctly, Mish Grigor was your dramaturg? What was that process of working closely with a dramaturg like in your studio while making a solo?

I’ve watched Mish perform for many years and I know her work. I knew that I needed a dramaturg and I needed someone who understood movement, dance history and text—and she’s so good at asking questions that makes you feel, somehow, both encouraged and a little bit terrified. She’s a real provocateur. I would work the first half of the day by myself and she would come in in the latter part of the day. I realised in making this work that I was interested in dance not necessarily because of the expressive notion of movement but because of the possibilities of the communities, kinship and the pursuit of pleasure, fun and the transmission that can come from dancing. Rinse was an internal shift for me.

My practice has been deeply influenced by Dalisa Pigrum and Rachel Swain from Marrugeku in the way of dancing and the thinking around approaching dancing in a task based, state of being way. But, this also felt like because I’m talking about (mostly) beginnings, I’m conjuring up pasts in some ways like—because in the beginning of talking x y z , because in the beginning I was studying at Alvin Ailey, and because I’m putting a beginning into the room, I’m also dancing away from it.

You answered that question in a dramaturgical arc that mirrors the work from the sounds of it—with the ideas of repetitions and returns intrinsic to your response. I want to chat about one of your works that has toured extensively: A call to dance. You’ve really taken this work to the ends of the earth and had all kinds of conversations with people of every ilk. You chat to them about their heritage and belonging and cultural expression and authenticity one on one and then make up a dance informed by their rebellion at sun down as a gift back to the place and their time. I love the absolute lack of elitism in this exchange. It must have been so illuminating…

There’s the process of sitting with people, hundreds, in really different cultural contexts in this work. It was exhausting and exhilarating. Their memories of dance, or their recalcitrance to it or that they’d never done it. Movement in some ways exists in people’s DNA and I got to pick up that data in very different social contexts for A call to dance. I was in Hanover doing the work and I’d had a couple of sessions that were intense because of the language barrier and then I met this older gentleman who had a gorgeous, dramatic name and I asked what he did for work. And he said he was a caretaker for the dying. He said to me, ‘I ask the people I provide care for how they would like to choreograph their own death’. And I was like whoa, and we kinda went through his stances around how he would choreograph his death and it was the first response that really stood out to me in the many iterations that A call to dance has now had.

But also working with children at the Arts Centre Melbourne—they were so weird and wonderful. On a completely different note, doing the same piece in Norway with reindeer herders where in talking to this one guy who shared that his choreography was about leaning against the trees on the west side with such intensity that he may spin the earth on its axis so the nights aren’t as dark as they are in a Norwegian winter.

It was one of those works that I did where I would finish that work and I would dance their somatic and personal experiences and be on a high but the next morning I would start again and feel the weight of the conversations to come. Like, wow!

Gosh, there’s lifetimes in that response. Sneak peeks of things that matter most to people and traces of memory and flesh that are now imprinted whole on parts of you. A review in Artshub called it ‘the ultimate archive’ and I tend to agree with that sentiment. Alerting the world to your TEDx Talk. Do you stand by the belief that everybody can dance?

I stand by a lot of what I said in my TEDx Talk. Especially at that time doing dance classes with hundreds of people at nightclubs, I was tapping into something in the zeitgeist. I was addressing some kind of childhood persona or deep state. My whole IN into the dance world was being drawn to video clips. Then taking the things that I really loved for such a long time and dancing for fun in a dark and loud space and loving that experience and learning how to teach in and learn from communities and generations of women. I’m so lucky to have them in my life even today as people who have witnessed me in my practice. Sometimes I’m like ‘God, Amrita, you’re so twee and earnest’, but that love for dance is inextricably part of who I am.

I’m part of a demi-communal silent writing group that hang out every Friday called the writers’ army—it’s the only zoom I look forward to and it is facilitated by theatremakers Liv Satchell and Emma Valente. You just write in collective silence in a zoom room of a dozen people for 45 minutes and someone in the group offers a different provocation week on week to close the cycle. The provocation doesn’t have to have anything to do with your writing and everyone in the group is invited to share thoughts on the reflection if anything surfaces for them. Recently we chat about the spaces in between Capital ‘P’ Practice and small ‘p’ practice. I’d love to hear more about your small ‘p’ practice—not from a theoretical perspective but what the repetitive rituals you come back to are?

This might sound super mundane but small ‘p’ practice for me includes finding different ways to dance, running, reading and searching for some way to find like I’m on the line with my body. A way to continuously sense that. I hate that I’m saying this but it’s also emailing people and checking in with people and talking to people on the phone. Having those conversations about not dance but other fascinations. I’ve begun thinking about training my body and breathing and breath from the perspective of free diving. There’s something about that feeling of going into different depths of water that has been really good for me. I’m still figuring out my limits with it but I enjoy the viscerality of unblocking my ears and staying where I shouldn’t be.

I’m terrified of the ocean and that would be my worst nightmare (outing myself as a bad Sydneysider) but it reminds me of this company from close to my hometown, Adishakti. As part of their pedagogy and process, they have series of exercises underwater to understand the internal movements that take place in producing sound, build more resonance to voice and awaken the psychological centres of the body. The sheer rigour of it all. Thank you for sharing. practice is such a sacred thing.

I want to chat about collaboration in your practice because I think of your ongoing collaborations with Jahra ‘Rager’ Wasasala and I’m automatically like, two qweens! But more generally, what is day one of a collaboration with a new team—how do you enter that space?

Depends on the project. I’ll use an example. Where I worked with Jahra for A Caltex Spectrum, day one was me making us all do karaoke as a team at the clothing store room to get the echo of our own voices but also to get us arriving for each other in a certain mode and vulnerability. I generally invite some kind of fun—though it also shows me as a maker a little bit about my performers from their choices through their unconscious. Dancers have this amazing generosity with their openness of spirit and I never experience anything like that outside of my dance community. I may be biased because of my a la mode but I truly believe this spirit is unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

My day one of the tender for The National was a lot about bull fighting, and rodeos, and bucking. I mean we watched a LOT of rodeo videos.

But I’ve also made smaller, independent works that not a lot of people saw. And I have some silly but beautiful memories of playing around with Jahra including her washing my hair in a bucket in this process—the luxurious availability artists have of close contexts in restricted time. This was before anyone knew who I was. Me and Jahra have different opinions on things which was an attractive force in us dreaming together. Different ways of doing things and making our bodies talk but they fit around each other really nicely. She’s the best though, I’ve learnt a lot from her and we learn a lot from each other in the transmission of our practices.

We have frequently talked about our queasy associations with the term leadership. You told me when you came back from Europe about this dance workshop and how everyone in the workshop of strangers put their hands on you when they were asked to put their hands on a leader. And how this moment caught you completely off guard in the studio space. That particular conversation was cut short by me choking on a wasabi and having to run home. Let’s pick up where we left off. How do you shoulder responsibility or more accurately what is your orientation to leadership, conceptually and personally, at this moment in time?

I’m going to first answer this question by saying how I feel and then try and state what I want after.

In a lot of what I feel really capable is as an artist to have transparent, difficult but critical conversations about things. Being able to do that, though, shouldn’t make me a leader. Theres’ a real rally for First Nations leadership at this moment. Being a leader personally feels like I have little room to get it wrong, but that should simply not be true.

People also see a leader as someone who would offer salvation and I don’t want to be anybody’s salvation. I think about it with this First Nations excellence or First Nations damnation but where’s the space for First Nations mediocrity? I’m not saying I want to be mediocre but I’m willing to stand for something, to contribute to something of practice—to the arts, to my dance.

I was talking about leadership today with dancer/choreographer Luke George and we were talking about Philip Adams teaching at VCA. We talked about much but highlighted his consistency in his ability to be surprising. I don’t want to be a leader because I’m good or because it plays into a paternalistic view that artists have of themselves in the arts, especially in Melbourne. And I sure don’t want to be a good girl. I just want to take risks, and commune, and make a promise - in a way that serves myself, and the form, but also friendship and love. In so many ways being surprising to myself and others is the shared project of leadership.

Who are you excited by artistically?

So much is exciting me right now. There’s Ange Goh, Vincent Namatjira, The White Pube. There’s APHIDS and what they do is really inspiring.

I’m enjoying seeing artists’ rigour in their work and pushing form but also enjoying artists having a grand old time in their practice and able to mitigate things by swimming in the joy of it. That I think is really interesting. I’m interested in how we can think about participation and experience in different ways that afford sincerity and thinking of international artists like Martine Syms and how we’re interacting with technology in an enthralling way but also in a beautiful and personal way.

I’m excited about so much for RISING. I was working on five projects at the start of the year and I was exhausted. Then the pandemic hit, and I was like ‘what’s even the point of art?’. Like so many artists, I was definitely at a low point for parts of this year. But then I was on the curatorial panel for RISING. I really trust the vision of Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek. I was working alongside them and I was reading all these applications from Melbourne artists and their ideas and the process of it really invigorated me. I tasted possibility, you know? Artists are always the first ones asked to be flexible and resilient and adapt and change and move - but to see artists committed to the integrity of their ideas and work and the belief that things will happen again in ways where they touch on the personal in the universal, it gave me life. Artists never deny themselves the personal.

Totally. The hope of an idea feels revolutionary at this moment.

Yeah. Because even if it fails—at least we are in motion towards something.

What tabs are open on your desktop right now?

Ooo okay! [nervous laughter] A definition of hysteria. How to be a more perfect hysteric in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. An application to Chunky Move. An introduction to Lacan. Ali express search for daggers from China. My own website. Lots of zoom invitations and Ebay Marni sandals in checkout.

What does the lineage and legacy of your dual ancestries from Indigenous lands mean to you?

First and foremost, it makes me really good looking! LOL. It gives me great skin. I have a vibrant presence. And on top of that, it gives me a great sense of humor and an excellent Indigenous flying syntax.

At the moment, I’m caught up with the preoccupation of people’s definitions, like what they’re willing to stake their claim in, in terms of identifying with something. I’m reminded of Zadie Smith’s writing recently where she says that suffering informs its participants in subtle and complicated ways. The idea that one should lead with their cultural allegiance first and their truth second is one that doesn’t sit right with me. There’s no way to be a one dimensional person—everybody is existing in the multiples and to think that you don’t no matter what your origin is such denial. I think through the dilemma of authenticity at length in my practice and I find it hard to talk about Indigeneity without talking about spirituality, without talking about love, without talking about land.

While I would hate for anyone to be interested in my practice purely because of my identity, part of having these incredible lineages also comes with honour and respect. The ability to have the space to contemplate my family’s legacy and how brave and intelligent my ancestors were - it’s deeply nourishing to hold that candle.

The impossibility of my response in itself makes this question interesting…