Traces from elsewhere: dancing together across distance and time

This article discusses the patchwork of meaning, connections and perspectives within a creative project from the viewpoint of an insider collaborator/performer. It plays across affective registers of distance and closeness with an oscillating lens which shifts focus to engage with different perspectives of the creative process. It transitions between the micro and macro views of a dance piece through this situated perspective of a performer by linking personal meaning making to the broader socio-political context in which the work emerges. The piece under discussion, Time Over Distance Over Time is deeply intimate, in that the content is drawn from the lives of the performers who endeavored to reignite personal connections over large distances and work creatively in a dispersed space before coming together to complete the dance piece. The article weaves between various narrative layers and writing registers, uncovering the complexity of the creative process and the subject matter as experienced by the author, to question how mobility might be enabled or curtailed, through circulating bodies, texts and/or digital traces.