“Muscles” murmured Crisp. This is followed by “organic matter,” purposefully articulated as if the words have travelled from the soles of her feet all the way up her windpipe and through her voice box. And later, to paraphrase, “why didn’t someone just tell her to stop!” as Crisp looks exasperated at her energetic selves projected on the walls. Looking back at all you’ve achieved is a brutal business. Especially when it is done with such honesty, one sensation at a time, rolling, wave-like, into the next. “If you were expecting a more formal retrospective,” she quips, “you can get your money back, but as not many of you paid . . . ” and the audience chuckles. The body can no longer do what it used to do, but it persists. “The dance only ends when we stop paying attention to what’s changing,” Crisp notes.[3] This could equally apply in this context.

In an artists’ continual process of evaluation, Crisp recounts looking back through her archival footage during recent periods of lockdown. Ever questioning, if Australia has more than 1,900 listed threatened species [4], what have I, in my allotted time, done to help prevent this? For Crisp, it seems, it is not enough to merely be in nature, you need to give back to nature too by caring for it, fighting for the protection of what remains, and raising awareness. Crisp describes the moment she became aware of how she felt when she was in the bush and realised that the feeling was the same as when she dances: a state of complete absorption. Two formerly independent strands are revealed to have been connected all along. She draws up like a sponge, or rather, an elusive Australasian Bittern on the Critically Endangered list of 71 Threatened Birds in the East Gippsland Shire: “how to live with this ruin?”[5]