Saltlines for Sealion Women

<p dir="ltr">SALTLINES FOR SEALION WOMEN is a community dance project centered on recovery, safety and kinship. It engaged a local community on the southern coast of Aotearoa New Zealand in choreography inspired by the recolonisation of Otago’s coastline by Pakake, one of the rarest and most endangered sea lion in the world. Through all-weather dance workshops on the beach, archival research, guided improvisations and field trips with marine scientists and conservationists the choreographic dramaturgy emerged for an in situ performance as part of the Wild Dunedin New Zealand Festival of Nature. Core collaborators on the project were Fiona Graham (dramaturg), Bronwyn Kidd (photographer), Anna Noonan (Producer) and Russell Scoones (composer) who worked with me as choreographer to shape the artistic and aesthetic design. Twenty women aged between 21 and 76 performed and we also included the voices of local women aged between 7 and 99 in the original sound design (heard through headphones by the mobile audience). Undergirded by the drive of Pakake (New Zealand sealions) to breed on the beaches, sand dunes and coastal waters in and around Dunedin; and coterminously the efforts of women throughout the world to make safe spaces to thrive, the research addressed critical issues of care and safety for female mammals. Humans are working out how to move and live alongside these extraordinary creatures of the sealand. No longer prey - hunted for fur, skin, oil and teeth - they are co-habitants of the city. Following their near extinction because of colonial-capitalism, the research explored how to share space without being afraid of their difference and whilst restoring their mana (Rewi 2022). Saltlines for Sealion Women is a project of community solidarity, a dance of kinship with the Pakake, who are a living testimony to the potentialities for species revitalisation and return. </p>