Prologue: Dream/Archive: The Australian Central Desert as Generative Environment

After spending several weeks in sands of Todd-Mpamtwe Riverbed in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, I came home to receive semi-arid hills in Fairfield, in Central Valley of California, as camel humps - precious, personified and dear to me in a way I had never experienced before. One year later, after a week of performing in crisp dirt and rocky underground of desert location of Wendover, Utah, I returned again to my native California to receive foothills of Merced outside of Yosemite National Park as intimate acquaintances. I could see their gentle vastness as I never had before. I was no longer alienated from them as enemies, with perspective of a kid raised on coast and fearful of any sort of loathsome dryness.My experiences in desert had somehow brought me closer to my own home territory by alienating me from my pre-existing frame of reception of these environments. These changes, which I have observed to represent sustained cognitive transformations, are reason I have become invested in durational site-based performance projects in misunderstood spaces, middleof-nowheres, those locations that American West writer Wallace Stegner refers to as the romantic waste places of (2003: 321).While I knew that my perspective had shifted in a dramatic way as a result of these performances in desert spaces, and was marked by a shift in both language I used to describe these spaces and feeling state I now associated with arid locations, I did not yet understand just why change had occurred. Furthermore, it was curious to me that an experience elsewhere had changed my reception of home - in other words, my experience there was informing my understanding and appreciation of here.In both cases, transformation in my experience of place had gone from rejection and fear of arid climates to respect and admiration, even fondness, for those same locations and others similar. What was constitution of my resistance to an arid environment in first place? Was I simply naive to diversity of ecologies that world offers? Or had I been enculturated with a series of metaphorical constructs around desert environments that had, until now, informed my cognitive reception of place?On Balance as a Site-Specific Mode of ThinkingMy experience and thinking about desert have been shaped to a large degree by work with choreographer Tess de Quincey, and her BodyWeather1 performance group De Quincey Company, who made a series of journeys to Northern Territory between 1999-2005 for purposes of research and creative activity. I was with De Quincey Company (DQCo.) on their 2005 journey to Alice Springs, Northern Territory, during which time they rehearsed and performed their production of Dictionary of Atmospheres as part of Alice Desert Festival. I was an observer, an intern, a publicity person and social-secretary of sorts, and a part of production crew that stomped around in sands of Todd-Mpamtwe Riverbed supporting performance with lights and props and technology.As I charted means by which DQCo. engaged with environment, I could not help but chart my personal reaction to space. In our first site visits to riverbed and adjacent Spencer Hill, all part of kilometer of space that we would traverse as part of performance, I was particularly aware of sensations of being off-balance. There were distinct differences in my physical experience that produced these sensations: a stronger sense of gravitational pull on climbing Spencer Hill, an inability to effectively navigate thick riverbed sands with my inexperienced feet. And there were also emotional sensations of being off-balance tied to physical reality of place: my fear of sun, my fear of and attempts to engage with feral dogs that roamed in packs around performance space and in town.I was discombobulated in any number of ways and employed various strategies to protect and tend to myself, which manifested in sometimes neurotic application of sunblock and insistence on wearing many layers of clothing regardless of how hot it became. …