Alice MacKenzie is a dance artist, performer and writer. Her work tangles speculative fiction with medicinal plants and cultures of bacteria which she shares as performances, perfumes and leaky texts. She is fascinated by the ways in which performances can build temporary worlds, and is happiest when working in collaboration. Most recently Alice’s work has been commissioned by Sånafest, Northern Sustainable Futures, Nya Nya Norrland, and Delta: An Ocean Call.

As a performer Alice has worked across Europe in galleries, forests and on stages with artists including elieli, Siriol Joyner, Ina Dokmo, Kristin Nango, Cally Spooner, Dora Garcia, Eleanor Bauer, Tino Sehgal and Yvonne Rainer. She works alongside other artists and organisations making books, films, performances and installations in collaboration with people of all ages.

She has been a long term artist in residence at both an elderly care home and a special educationalschool in London. Between 2010 and 2015 Alice was part of a collective of dance artists running BELLYFLOP magazine.

alicemackenzie.blogspot.com

- Peggy Shaw and The Clod Ensemble, text from the performance Must.


In the city I was born in you cannot dig anywhere without finding traces of humans, most long since
dead. It's a city built on top of other cities, and the shores of its river are a tinkling mess of stones,
bits of broken pottery and bones at low tide. In some places they have installed paving slabs made
of glass so that you can glance down at the remains of a 900 year old hospital (which in turn was
built on top of the site of a Roman cemetery) whilst you run to buy an overpriced sandwich on your
lunch break. Pipes, cables, old foundations, layers of waste in different states of decay, tree roots,
mycelium, tunnels, buried rivers.

An excavation is a kind of exposure. Digging down deep in order to expose something to the light.
She works in the darkness, she plays at the edges, applying both trowels and fine brushes to her
dancing. Is it time she is showing us? How far down does she want to get in her body of dancing?
How many layers? How delicate the excavation? What happens to these artefacts when they are
taken out of their place of darkness and held up in the light? How do their chemicals change under
our watching eyes?




Anna sits beside me at the back of the audience as the sound begins to seep into the space. The
room is inky black, its walls hidden by black felt, giving the sound a velvety space that it fills:
deliciously, thickly. She is wearing black too, trailing dark tendrils behind her as she slides from cracks
to crevices and into the waiting room.

She dances behind the curtains like a cartoon ghost, animating the walls in big puffs of air and
thuds of hands against heavy felt. Or like someone lost in the wings trying to find the way back in.
She dances in an artificial twilight so dim that she appears slowly oh so slowly, her dance made
visible at the pace of my eyes adjustment to the light, her edges blurring, light finding her skin but
smudging against the blackness of her clothes. She sits down at the edge of the audience and looks
out at the stage, seen but inviting seeing. She gargles in darkness. There is humour, and seriousness.
A playful pleasure in these public acts of appearing and disappearing. A dance for Anna, a dance
for the space, a dance for the sound, a moment to sit in my own body and feel the texture of liquid
rock.




Its a science fiction film. The surface of the planet comes nearer and nearer, the reddish rock and
dust fill my body with its hum. You can hear the curve of the horizon and the bending rays of a far
away sun as light crests over the ridge. And it spins.

Arms spinning, blood rushing to her fingertips. A furious dance of speed and compulsion here at the
still point, the dense place which pulls everything towards it until there is nowhere else to go. Atoms
vibrate, structure dissolves, she becomes liquid.





- Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva , as translated by Stefan Tobler.










- Cut outs from Weijermars, Principle of Rock Mechanics.


Delighting in that which I don’t understand. The materials scientist I live with rolls his eyes. I pick at
little gems cut up and out of context to give me words for the experience of dancing.

Anna moving in all directions at once.




She is lying down but falling.





The sound of water in her mouth. A dripping, gurgling song in the darkness. I laugh. A spring
bubbling up in her, bringing with it minerals, metals, saliva from deep underground.

Siriol Joyner lying down and gargling water in a performance called “Agua Viva” in Berlin in 2014.
It was sexy, someone said. It felt sexy, she said. Gargling with Cara and Siriol in a basement studio
in 2024, staring up at the wide dome of the ceiling. Gargling until the water got warm and thick and
made me gag. Trilling soft tissue at the back of my throat. The smell of disgust.

She reappears dripping water from her hair.
There is a lightness to her, an intensity.

BY ALICE MACKENZIE

EXCAVATIONS

APPEARING AND DISAPPEARING/ PLAYING THE EDGES

PLANETS: AT THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD

THE VISCOSITY OF ROCK

TIPPING

GARGLING

I keep finding the future inside of me. I can hear it really loud, coming like a field of windmills, or a hive of bees.

I know, I know, I know.

I am digging. Deep past the topsoil.

I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music - I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.

The global flow of rocks
Deformed
By crystalline creep

Creep, creep, creep
A lurking strain of memory
In the granular texture of rocks