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(Photography: Edith Amituanai)
(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

PartnersOctober 5, 2023

Sarah Foster-Sproull on the art of movement

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)
(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

In this instalment of Art Work, dancer, choreographer and the artistic director Sarah Foster-Sproull talks about the multidisciplinary practice of physicalising, embodying and making.

Sarah Foster-Sproull is a dancer, choreographer, and the artistic director and founder of Foster Group dance company. She is a senior lecturer of dance studies at the University of Auckland, and a choreographer in residence at the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Her work includes Despite The Loss of Small Detail (2018), Artemis Rising (2019), Orchids (2020), which have all been critically acclaimed locally and internationally. Foster Group’s work Double Goer (2023) was recently performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and will make its New Zealand debut at the Nelson Arts Festival this month.

What an average work week looks like

Every week is quite different. The thing that tethers my work week to something, that gives it some structure, is the work I do at the university. I’m often negotiating research leave that enables me to engage in my practice. 

It makes for a real matrix of organisation, and that’s one of the key things I’ve learned at this stage of my career is that the administration of the job is quite big. If I want to do all the things I want to do, I have to be quite organised. 

If someone comes to me and says, “Are you available to do a workshop in January?” then I’ll say, “Yes I am … in these weeks!” and hope that we can lock something in that’s agreeable to all parties, so that I can do all the things. I find that I often have to negotiate for time to jump backwards and forwards, to things here and things overseas. 

I feel thankful that there are opportunities to work overseas and make locally, that’s certainly something I’ve been working towards for a long time, but it comes with another layer of administration which is visas, negotiating time off my work at the university and all of the things that come with that.

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

On keeping a work-life balance

The impression I get sometimes is that I feel on tap, easy to contact at any time, and because of my personality type or desire to maintain my working relationships, I respond really quickly, generally. That has me on a knife’s edge a lot. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries around my working week and sometimes I’m really good at protecting those boundaries and sometimes I’m diabolical. One of the conversations I had recently with my producer is that we don’t need to be responding to emails at six in the morning. We don’t need to be responding outside of work hours. 

The requirements of the job shouldn’t really force us to work 24 hours a day, there has to be a better way. I’m quite determined to find that way. I don’t respond to work emails on the weekend, that’s my first stage of the boundary. I want to encourage that with the people I work with as well, set that as a boundary for the company – that we work within the hours that are reasonable, and we’ll agree on what those reasonable hours are, because nothing’s that urgent. Aliens are real, we’re all gonna die, let’s do the work within a reasonable timeframe.

How academic life flowed into a practice

I started postgraduate research in 2013 because I was looking for something more. I was pushing up against that in my professional relationship with work as a performer and asking those questions in rehearsals: “Why are we doing this the way we’re doing it?” 

The next step was, for me, to investigate things in an academic environment, which also brings with it all sorts of things – structures and systems that aren’t necessarily always congruent with the instinctive way that I like to work in the studio. In the beginning, I came in to figure out how I was going to instigate a new voice because by and large I had felt like a silent dancer for several years. I’d had a career as a performer for about 15 years before I transitioned into making things, and I was always making things under the auspices of someone else’s name. 

Those systems are saying one thing about how choreography is made but I know, from the inside, that it works in a different way, and wanting to voice the ways in which choreography is made and facilitated, and is communal. The first part of the research that I did here was in the zone of a dancer’s role in a choreographic process, and revising the choreographic practice as a service that a choreographer delivers to dancers to partake of.

Around 2015, I realised I’d had all of these thoughts about making and had started writing about it so I should probably formalise that by putting it into practice with a company structure, so that what I’ve been talking about lives in reality. 

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

I formed Foster Group and started working long term on projects with people that I really care about. These projects take a long time, and academically, the process that I use to make the work is the same process I use to research at the university, but sometimes it takes different forms. With the lineage that I came through as a dancer, there’s a real desire to tie down and categorise what it is that you do: you’re a dancer, you do this sort of dance, you do these things really well. I’ve become more and more skeptical of such definitions now that I recognise that the way that I want to work.

The performers are makers of the work with me and we collectively own the work. We don’t actually have a contract, we have letters of agreement that we share that are the ownership document of the work. I can’t recreate that work without those people, unless they don’t want to be involved, that’s the only trigger that would bring somebody else in.

That’s how work is being made. It’s not anything new. So many different companies make work in this way. Then I work in other environments as well that operate in different ways. I often feel like a shapeshifter that has to morph and change around the environment and through the environment that I’m working within. I don’t have a problem with that at all, as long as the ethics and beliefs that I have are embraced and upheld in those environments. 

If they’re not, I won’t work there. That’s just the vibe.

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

Making work while having an academic career

Sometimes it works really well, and sometimes it’s really hard. It’s to do with figuring out how one thing bleeds into the next, and how I can use the skills or the interests from one zone to the next. 

I’m going to make something in New York with the New York Choreographic Institute. I’m really excited about that, but I am not currently working with ballet dancers in Auckland, so I’m figuring out what structures I can engage in that environment, so I can shorthand some process, because it’s quite fast! So I’ve made an arrangement with my third year students that we’re going to work on some of the structures I might look at in New York in our choreographic intensive time, as a mechanism of the learning environment as well.

 They get some real world experience of what it might be like to work in a studio to create a choreography in that sort of environment, and then I expose some of the thinking around why I do certain things, and that’s a reciprocal exchange. Through that, they can adopt any of the things they find interesting into their own practices.

The biggest contribution to my ability to negotiate those spaces is my boss Ralph Buck [head of University of Auckland’s Dance Studies programme]. He is the most amazing person I’ve ever worked with. He often says, “What do you want to do? Just go and do it.” and then he figures out how to support from the back, the gaps that I might leave if I go. 

Because of New York, I’m missing out on the last moments of teaching this intensive. He tells me that I’ve gotta go do it, so he makes it work, and he values all of the research that his staff does equally. It doesn’t matter if it’s a choreography for one company, or for a gallery, or a performance work or a piece of writing, he values all these works. 

Sometimes I feel like I get professional development from working at the university, and sometimes I feel like I give professional development in the practice of teaching, and those moments are essential for me because otherwise I’m just going to feel ground down and have nothing left to give.

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

What structures would make it easier

The thing that I would want to change are the mechanisms through which those practitioners apply for funding, and how that’s awhi’d through the system in ways that embrace multiple ways of being. The writing practice predominantly defines the mechanism of assessment. I enjoy writing and it’s a skill I’ve developed over time. It’s entirely possible that up-and-coming makers might not yet have a developed written language for their work. I’d like to see some funding writing support for those that want it.

I hear a lot of things through my peers who I am in contact with that are frustrated of the lack of funding, or about not getting funding, and I just wonder whether it’s because of what was written on that application. It’s not to do with the value of those people and their practice, but it can make you feel that way.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to write my own marketing copy. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to fill out forms that could have been filled out by other people. I’m very tired of that, but that’s about the systems, that’s about bureaucracy, that’s about capitalism, that’s about all of those things that I am just damned sick of. How do you still achieve the things you want to achieve without having to fill in those fucking forms?

The changing value of the arts

In my family, we value the arts above everything else and in the university, I see that some systems might be geared towards STEM subjects, and that’s where the majority of where Aotearoa’s university students are enrolling, and so to speak about the value of art is of significant importance now.

I want my children to do exactly what they want to do. They’ve grown up painting, and making sculptures, and making plays together in their bedrooms. That’s what we value as a family, but I think the discussion around that is to do with risk. Let us not be scared about what the future holds. Let us commit to the possibility that a career in the arts is possible. You don’t have to tie yourself down to an accounting degree. Why not become a cellist? Why not play guitar in your bedroom forevermore and make your own albums? Why not make comics? Why not? I know there are other parents out there encouraging this, and we need to continue!

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

Some of the students coming into our environment in dance studies with parents very hesitant for their career – “What will they do? What will they do? What is the career for them at the end of this education?”. 

That was never a concern for me, that wasn’t something that my parents brought up. We’re still at the same place of needing to advocate for the value of arts, because it actually is everywhere. We all engage in it. Sometimes we don’t recognise that’s what we’re doing.

What makes it all worth it

Sitting in the audience and having that overwhelming feeling of contributing to authorship, contributing to something new, contributing to something that allows the world to be seen in different ways, and feeling an interconnection between the idea that lives up here, in the ether, and comes through me, in collaboration with the people I work with, to come to fruition as a real thing. A thing that can sometimes open a portal where you can see the unimagined. 

It sounds very woo-woo, but this has happened to me a few times in my career. Two times as a performer, and a few times in watching work, where I feel like all of the things of the universes align and I’m seeing something that I was meant to see, in the way I was meant to see it, and I understand more about the world and my place. 

It’s a deep sense of interconnection with the otherworld, and the ideas, and my ancestry, and the future. That’s, ultimately, having touched on those experiences as a performer, and experiencing them, that is the church that I go to. That’s what I’m always trying to touch – the edge of the void where anything is possible. That’s it.

– As told to Sam Brooks.

(Photography: Edith Amituanai)

Keep going!
A collage-style image in green with an eye, lips, an ear and a hand in a thumbs up, and a picture of a some coloured pencils, a smart speaker and a bluetooth hearing aid.
(Image: Getty, additional design: Tina Tiller)

PartnersSeptember 27, 2023

The everyday technologies essential for accessibility

A collage-style image in green with an eye, lips, an ear and a hand in a thumbs up, and a picture of a some coloured pencils, a smart speaker and a bluetooth hearing aid.
(Image: Getty, additional design: Tina Tiller)

It’s easy to take for granted, but technology exists to help us. The Spinoff spoke to four disabled people about the tech they consider essential.

We often think of technology as irking us – Duolingo scolds, Instagram pesters and TikTok steals time. But, if I did throw my phone out the window of a speeding car, what would wake me up in the morning?

For the one in four New Zealanders who have a disability, technology can be even more essential. Features and products that the other three quarters of people take for granted can be crucial for people’s ability to live independently and participate fully in society. 

One NZ retail employees see customers coming into stores with access needs every day, seeking advice on the best device for their needs, or how to alter settings on their current device to best utilise vision or audio features – setting up devices by changing font sizes, adding colour filters, or finding the best ring tone at a comfortable frequency. These small changes can make a big difference to customers connecting with loved ones or accessing crucial information on their devices.

Below, a range of people tell us about a technology they find essential in their everyday lives.

Natasha Gallardo – chief executive of the National Foundation for Deaf and Hard of Hearing

What is a piece of technology you find essential?

My Bluetooth hearing aids are essential, I’ve been using them for roughly five years.

How do you use them from day to day? 

I use the Bluetooth connectivity everyday to play music, watch my favourite shows, and talk to people on the phone. I answer the phone directly into my hearing aids, which means I can hear clearly and don’t have to pick up the phone. I can also connect Netflix, or Zoom calls, directly to my hearing aids. It means I can hear conversations clearly without captions. 

What did you do before Bluetooth hearing aids were available? 

There was no technology available like this when I was growing up and diagnosed with hearing loss as a teenager so it made all the everyday tasks challenging back then – like talking on the phone which became near impossible to do until bluetooth hearing aids became available.

Are they popular in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community?

Yes for newer models of hearing aids, behind the ear options and for those in the upper range too. Not all hearing aids are the same so not all have this capability but I wish it was available for everyone as it makes life so much easier.

A collage-style image in green with some ears and a picture of a bluetooth hearing aid.

Julie Woods – ‘That blind woman 

What is a piece of technology you find essential?

I love my Alexa Smart Speaker. I was alerted to Alexa around five years ago, when I was having some adaptive technology lessons. The instructor came to teach me something else and on the way out, said “have you heard about these smart speakers?” And now we’ve got not one but four in our apartment. They’ve all got different names. There’s Alexa and Ziggy and Amazon and Echo, and they’re all connected. 

How do you use Alexa, Ziggy, Amazon and Echo? 

I use them everyday for loads of things, like asking what’s the time, what’s the population of Spain, what’s the phone number of Briscoes, how do you spell bureaucracy, and play relaxing guitar on Spotify. Also with the speakers I can access podcasts, Ted Talks and the Talking Book Library. 

What did you do before you had them? 

I went blind 26 years ago. You can learn to do things in different ways, that’s what I had to do. I had to stop seeing and instead smelling, hearing, tasting and touching. I use my other senses to receive information. Now I read with my ears and my fingers.

I can access the internet through a computer, with the program JAWS which reads the screen. But there’s quite a few steps involved in that, for me as a blind person. It’s one tool in the toolbox, but the more ways you can do the same thing, the better.

Are smart speakers popular in the blind community?

When somebody goes blind, and they become a member of Blind Low Vision NZ, they automatically get an Alexa. It’s great. There’s been a massive change in 26 years. I heard about a member of Blind Low Vision NZ who had a fall and asked Alexa to phone his sister and call an ambulance. It’s great for safety. 

A collage-style image in green with some lips and a picture of a smart speaker.

Áine Kelly-Costello – disability advocate, storyteller, PhD candidate

What is a piece of technology you find essential?

The camera on my phone is a pretty essential accessibility function for me, and many blind people. 

How do you use it?

There’s apps, like Seeing AI or Envision, which can read text to you. And so together with the camera, I can access printed text (think food labels, medication labels, reading the post, sometimes bus stop signs…). The apps try to account for the fact that a blind person is going to need some assistance getting a good shot. But they’ll only get you so far, sometimes you actually need a human on the other end. 

With a camera phone I can also video call a sighted person to check some random visual thing – there are some things you don’t want to have to figure out for yourself, like if a dog threw up on the carpet, or they can give an opinion on colour coordination of clothing. 

This wouldn’t be possible with a voice call alone, and it wouldn’t be possible with a camera that isn’t a phone.

Have you grown up being able to use your phone like this?

Optical character recognition has improved a lot these last few years. When I was younger, I probably wouldn’t have needed it to the same extent. But there were always battles – some teachers and lecturers didn’t cooperate and gave grades and feedback handwritten on a page. It’s only starting to get to the point now where OCR can sometimes manage handwriting, but it depends on the person. Examiners are quite notorious for having illegible handwriting. 

I didn’t realise how useful a camera phone can be for a blind person

It’s a good example of common technologies that can have supplementary functions. But, ultimately, we’ll never be able to only use mainstream features – I’m definitely going to need my phone to talk to me and sighted people don’t necessarily need that.

A collage-style image in green with an eye and a picture of a some coloured pencils.

Gabrielle Hogg – student at AUT, majoring in social sciences

What is a piece of technology you find essential?

I use the colour filters on my MacBook and iPad to help me read and process better. 

How long have you been using them?

I’ve been using colour filters in my glasses since my early 20s (I’m currently 35). I did not get a MacBook till I was about 25, I’ve been using the filters ever since. It’s something I do all the time. Colour filters are commonly used for Irlen Syndrome, a visual processing perceptual disorder, and in the neurodiverse community. Often people use them without realising they in fact have Irlen syndrome too. 

How do they work?

With the coloured filters, I can choose a colour to look through what I am reading or watching on my laptop and iPad. It doesn’t remove colour altogether. It doesn’t change the effect of the image, or video, or written words when you have Irlen syndrome – it actually makes it clearer and easier to see, it enhances the image. 

What did you do before you used coloured filters?

Before, I struggled a lot to get assignments done, and to read and take in what I was reading, without getting headaches, or concentrating issues. Technologies such as Apple products are often taken for granted by the general population, but for me, they have many accessibility features that no other products have. 

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