Jo Pollitt is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with the Centre for People, Place, and Planet at Edith Cowan University working across both the School of Education and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her work is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic and publishing platforms. Jo is co-founder of the feminist research collective The Ediths, artist-researcher with #FEAS -Feminist Educators Against Sexism, co-director of BIG Kids Magazine, and convenor of Dance Research Australia. Her debut novella The dancer in your hands was published in 2020.

Her current WA Weather Studios project brings artist, scientists and educators together to respond to two pressing issues of our times: human physical disconnection from their environments, and the planetary crisis of climate change. Centred on artist-led and kin/aesthetic practices to ignite collaborative responses and transdisciplinary conversations, WA Weather Studios disrupts singular narratives and engages multiple perspectives toward developing generative responses to climate crisis. These artist-led processes make it possible to sit with complexity, and not-knowing to create opportunity for deepened listening, heightened attention and increased agility in responding with unstable worlds.

WA Weather Studios builds on Conversation with Rain – a collaboration with the Art Gallery of Western Australia exploring children’s creative relations with weather as a way of potentially transforming our climate futures. This research harnesses multisensory, non-linear and experimental poetic pedagogies as an alternative to didactic learning.

CENTRE FOR PEOPLE PLACE AND PLANET (2019-2024)

‘Conversations with Rain’ is an ongoing multi-platform partnership between AGWA Learning and ECU School of Education exploring children’s creative relations with weather as a way of potentially transforming our climate futures. The project harnesses learning methodologies that prioritise creativity, participation and engagement.

Rather than didactic learning ‘about’ climate crisis, the ‘Conversations with Rain’ workshops and creative learning resources offer opportunities for sensing, noticing, breathing, wondering and experimenting toward open-ended imaginative outcomes.

Young children participated in studio workshops where they responded to Ngarralja Tommy May’s painting Raining on Kurtal as inspiration for the creation of a sensory Rain Book that became part of a wider Library of Rain including over 500 hand-made books.

Through the exploration of materials children performed impromptu soundscapes of rainfall which were recorded, and then arranged into an audio work called Sound of Rain – exhibited as part of The Botanical: Beauty and Peril.

Driven by artist practices of embodied attention and collective experimentation, ‘Conversations with Rain’ focuses on dissolving the binary between humans and the environment through creatively attending to the materiality of rain. The research investigates how interdisciplinary, embodied, and practice-led approaches can deepen engagement, lead to more responsive nature/culture relations, and enliven connection and empathy.

Ladders and boats rain upwards
A water-falling rain-field
Spiderwebs, sticks and strings
Sewing on the bottom of the ocean

Rain writing collected from multiple children’s responses to Raining on Kurtal, and curated by Jo Pollitt;

Pollitt, J., Blue, L., Blaise, M. (2019). Conversations with rain: A multi-platform researchcreation project. Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Blue, L., Pollitt, J., Blaise, M. (2023). Conversations with rain: Proposing poetic and nonlinear interpretation strategies in the Art Gallery. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 24(1.2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.26209/ijea24si1.2

OTHER WORK WITH CENTRE FOR PEOPLE PLACE AND PLANET

Pollitt, J., Kind, S., Delgado Vintimilla, C., & Blue, L. (2021). Choreographing collaboratories: Studios of situated improvisations. Children's Geographies. Advance online publication.https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.2006144

Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., & Rooney, T. (2021). Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years. Environmental Education Research, 27(8), 1141-1151. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434

Berry, A., Pollitt, J., Nelson, N., Hodgins, B. D., & Wintoneak, V. (2022). Dis/orientating the early childhood sensorium: A palate making menu for public pedagogy. Journal of Childhood Studies, 47(3), 74-91. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs202218330

#FEAS: FEMINIST EDUCATORS AGAINST SEXISMS

#FEAS are an Australian based, international feminist collective that was founded in 2016 and is co-led by Mindy Blaise, Emily Gray and Jo Pollitt. #FEAS are committed to developing arts-based interventions into sexisms in the academy and other informal educational spaces. We use a mix of humour, irreverence and collective action to interrupt and disarm both everyday and institutional sexisms within Higher Education and other spaces. Our interventions illustrate a feminism for our times that is creative, engaged, and affirmative. #FEAS feminism straddles the intersections of activism

WHEEL OF (MIS)FORTUNE (2021-2023) #FEAS

Wheel of (mis)Fortune Live at KISS Club: Consciousness raising for the 21st Century

THE EDITHS PRESS

#FEAS: UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2022)

#FEAS: UNFINISHED BUSINESS features the archive of #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism alongside work by Australian feminist artists.

The exhibition brings into focus a lineage of activist feminist art to invite thinking with practices that interrupt white patriarchal heteronormative narratives. The concept of an expanded zine connects the works, with ‘pages’ forming in vastly different ways. The exhibition offers irreverent, furious, funny, and tender insights toward connected and equitable feminist futures, unfinished…

#FEAS is an international feminist collective committed to developing creative interventions into sexisms in the academy and other places. It is co-led by Professor Mindy BLAISE, Dr Emily GRAY, and Dr Jo Pollitt.

Website: feministeducatorsagainstsexism.com / Twitter: @FEASproject / WAAPA

Gray, EM., Pollitt, J., Blaise, M. (2021). Between activism and academia: Zine-making as a feminist response to COVID-19. Gender and Education, 2021(Article in press), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2021.1931045

Gray, E. M., Ullman, J., Blaise, M., & Pollitt, J. (2023). ‘I'm broken but I'm alive’: Gender, COVID-19 and higher education in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 42(3), 588-602.https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2096576

Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., & Gray, E. (2022). Enacting a feminist pause: Interrupting patriarchal productivity in higher education. In D. Lupton & D. Leahy (Eds.), Creative approaches to health education: New ways of thinking, making, doing and learning. Routledge, Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003126508-3

Pollitt, J., Gray, E., Blaise, M., Ullman, J., & Fishwick, E. (2023). Performing feminist research: Creative tactics for communicating COVID-19, gender, and higher education research. Gender and Education, 35(5), 487-504. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2213727

THE SIMMERING (2022-2023)

In The Simmering, Perth-based writers Jo Pollitt and Maitland Schnaars engage in an emotional and intellectual boxing match that addresses challenging, often hidden, conversations within family relationships and societal roles.

For over a decade, the duo has been having a dialogue over Facebook, weaving a narrative of unsettling and overlapping histories. The outcome is a provocative exchange that unfolds in several intense rounds, set in an arena that includes a suburban kitchen, an outback AFL field, and an inner-city gym. Guided by a referee, each round aims to uphold a sense of 'fair play' as the writers grapple with issues related to class, race, and gender.

Featuring highly skilled performers Maitland Schnaars and Rachel Arianne Ogle, The Simmering combines dynamic text with choreography in a fierce yet tender confrontation, bringing to light deeply felt experiences of conflict, love, and unresolved tensions.

https://www.performinglines.org.au/projects/the-simmering/

References:

Pollitt, J. (2023). Choreographies of presence: Improvisation as feminist practice. In R.Candelario & M.Henley (Eds). Dance Research Methodologies (pp. 48-60). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003145615

Mauro-Flude, N., & Pollitt, J. (2023). I am _your_ pyrate dancer: Choreographic computabilities dancing inside the interstices of a visceral world. Leonardo, 56(1), 50-57.https://doi.org/10.1162/ leon_a_02301

Pahara, T., Pollitt, J., Raheem, A., Schmidt, T. (2021). Ensemblography: Making collaboration through performing writing. Global Performance Studies, 4(2), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv4n2a2

The dancer in your hands

The dancer in your hands is a superb and compellingly sustained poetic work. It mobilises striking innovations in notation, such as punctuation marks making visible the energetic, choreographic, and imaginative aspects of dance. As a book The dancer in your hands <> enacts the virtual, temporalized tremor, becoming a seismograph of latent bodily event. Refusing gendered binaries Pollitt engages in an erotics of the interstices, celebrating both the elongation of the moment and the exhilaration of the fugitive, or what the dancer-poet calls the radical impermanence of dance.

Mid-Embodied Conclusions

QUIET BEAST 2012

Quiet beast is a driven exchange, a side by side song cycle for two dancers, a duet that reins in the beast at our heels - downward, inward and under foot. It is a highly structured, aesthetically considered and specifically scored duet for the amplification of what is written and what can only be moved. It is physical work emergent from real-life dealing and rigorous documenting, supported by songs outlandish as evocative, and driven by the charge between Leach and Pollitt that comes from consistently writing dancing, re evaluating new terrain and honing in structure. The work was made in collaboration with writer Marcella Polain and musician Mace Francis.

Francis, M., Pollitt, J., Leach, P., Polain, M. (2012). Quiet Beast. Jo Pollitt and Paea Leach.

POST-GRADUATE STUDY

The dancer in your hands <> (2019-2020)

With the premise to ‘write like I dance,’ Writing as dancing investigates new methods of accessing and revealing choreographic thinking in three distinct ways; writing as a soloist, writing for the ensemble and writing responsively in collaboration.

Resulting iterations have variously emerged in the form of performance, novella, play, artist-book, exhibition and long form poem; the novella The Dancer in Your Hands, being the primary solo work presented alongside this exegesis.

The research posits engagement with solo dance improvisation practice as a dynamically charged, and tangible way of thinking that is transferable to the practice of writing. It draws on the quick shifting associational response systems and states of heightened attention as developed in the response project in my MA (2002). Writing as dancing proposes the activation of the ‘State of Dancingness’ in mobilising the act of writing as the centralisation of embodiment, and investigates the capability of the professional dancing body to reorient the relationship between dancing and the act of writing. This reorientation is discussed through examining fields of performance writing, feminist texts and queer phenomenology to excavate the liminal spaces between disciplines and the unhiding of emergent content. The agency of the dancer as author provokes new publishing platforms and an expanded readership for dance via the publication of embodied texts. She breathes.

Pollitt, J. T. (2019). Writing as dancing: The dancer in your hands , a novella. Edith Cowan University. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2191

She Writes like She Dances Response and radical impermanence in writing as dancing. (2017)

Through investigating writing as dancing, this work seeks to access, reveal and amplify the voice of danceras-writer in the production of new texts as embodied fictions. Harnessing processes of the response project and an emergent theory of radical impermanence, the dancer-as-writer is agent in inhabiting energetic states and scores practiced in dance improvisation to write like she dances. The provocation in this early catalogue of research is that the liveness of dance can potentially continue through, and be revealed in, the decision-making of writing; to make visible the dancer in a performance you can hold in your hands. The work in she writes like she dances is both an assertion of deep commitment to the liveness of improvisation, and a suspected betrayal.

Pollitt, J. (2017). She writes like she dances: Response and radical impermanence in writing as dancing. Choreographic Practices, 8(2), 199-218. https://doi.org/10.1386/chor.8.2.199_1