IN.STUDIO | AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA PETTITT AND NATHAN TURTUR

Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your practice and what you’re currently exploring?

Hello everyone! Our names are Jessica Pettitt and Nathan Turtur. During our IN.STUDIO residency we were exploring and refining our second development of Collisions Incoming, our new duet work premiering at the Subiaco Arts Centre as part of Enneagon Movements new performance program Threads. We spent our development refining and polishing our work just in time for us to hit the stage.

Can you tell us a little about what you have been working on during your IN.STUDIO sessions?

Jess and myself had a whole works worth of material ready to unpack, refresh, enhance, transform and craft into what has become the finished 2.0 model of Collisions Incoming. We’ve spent our time crafting the journey and progressive feeling of the work, working on its distinctive episodic nature drawn from our influences in film and media, extrapolating all of the key links we’ve found and even used our studio time to bring in some invited guests for a personalised showing. Getting some creative eyes on the work really helped open our thinking into new directions and possibilities. Being the two creatives and also the two performers we were keen to get some outside eyes and having the studio space from Co3 was exceptionally helpful at making that happen and ensuring we’d get a lot of worthwhile feedback.

Has having dedicated studio space changed or influenced the way you approach your creative process?

In this development it allowed us to slow down and be more mindful with our decision making process in regards to our choreographic choices. Having time and space allowed us to sit more thoughtfully in our process as we had the luxury to not rush our decisions and instead find some exploration in arriving at our answers. This exploration allowed us to find unique and interesting answers to our questions rather than forcing a first response due to time constraints.

IN.STUDIO is designed to give artists space to develop without the expectation of producing a finished outcome. How did that freedom affect your creative process?

While we did engage with this program with an end goal in mind that we were already working towards, I will still 100% praise having a program where that is not the goal. Having the possibility for space where you can just be is highly important to artists. Quite often major personal and artistic breakthroughs can happen when artists have the chance to sit with themselves and their minds and bodies and let their innate thoughts and feelings simmer up to the surface. When we get the chance to do that the subsequent journeys and pathways that can be found are extraordinary. An end goal can sometimes be a restraint so removing that layer just provides artists with the breathing room and freedom which is imperative for art to grow.

What are you taking away from this experience, and where might the work go next?

In reality, we’re taking away a finished work, and with a finished work the opportunities open right up. Once we perform its debut season, who knows where we might take it next! Local, regional, interstate, we might just keep our eyes out for any possibility to perform the work again and show everyone what we’re making here in WA!

Why do you think opportunities like IN.STUDIO are important for WA artists and the broader dance community?

Opportunities like this are quite important to the scene at large as it can be a fundamental way of starting new interpersonal connections, new artistic relationships and new seedling ideas. Whether you connect with some new artists, have a burning idea you just want to try, or just have yourself and a notebook there are a myriad of possibilities to come out of a residency like this. I believe the extensive nature of this residency is the exact reason why it’s needed in WA, you have a chance to do anything!