Making Art – Episode 11

Jo Lloyd

Episode Released 21st August 2020

The art of choreography, the skill of communicating complex ideas through movement alone, is not an easy one. Enter Melbourne’s Jo Lloyd. Creatively restless and wary of comfort zones, over the past 2 decades Jo has created a body of work that continues to challenge both hers and her audiences expectations, work that is brimming with ideas and creative risk, dance she herself calls “choreography as social encounter”.

And watching a Jo Lloyd piece you begin to understand what she mean by that description. Dancers writhe, run, jump and roll, their bodies seemingly possessed by play but with a deeper intent. It is work that is brimming with the richness of life’s experience, so much so that rather magically all of life’s joys and traumas can appear to slowly enter the room as a performance unfolds. And when the dancers throw their limbs or shake their bodies it begins to feel like they are reliving those life experiences, your experiences or alternatively being slapped and then cajoled by new ideas that can then seem to slowly slide out through the ends of their fingers and toes as they move on.
 

Photo: Peter Rosetzky

It’s compelling work that is trying to tell us something and not just something glib. Work that feels urgent and connects through movements that whilst highly technical seem incredibly loose, physically precise but at the same time utterly human. And this in many ways mirrors Jo’s thinking about making art. For her it is the human process of making a work that is fundamental, it is what the work is about, so much so that Jo herself says “the process is the piece”.

When we met virtually Jo’s initial worry was that because her thinking is so connected to the physicality she experiences in her studio space she wouldn’t be able to come up with anything to say. That could not have been further from the truth. I hope you enjoy my chat with Jo Lloyd.

website – www.jolloyd.com