If I Don't Understand You

Meri Blazevski and Shelley Lasica

If I Don’t Understand You is a collaborative screen-based work by artists Meri Blazevski and Shelley Lasica. Moving between the worlds of visual reference and bodily practice, the artists permute one of Lasica’s live performances If I Don’t Understand You to consider the persistence of choreography beyond a live event.

Poignant to the current global crisis—where information is reordered, the possibility of empathetic bodily cues are unavailable and communication is rematrixed in the digital realm so that touch, heat, moisture and tone are subsumed by dialogue and visual display—choreography offers a means to unpack the lack of a bodily and intuitive response to how we understand our surrounding.

Choreographer: Shelley Lasica

Cinematographer and Editor: Meri Blazevski

Mis-en-scène Consultant: Colby Vexler

Music: Milo Kossowski

Performers: Lydia Connolly-Hiatt, Luke Fryer, Shelley Lasica, Megan Payne, Lana Šprajcer

Producer: Zoe Theodore

Supported by: Australia Council, Creative Victoria, Neon Parc, Temperance Hall

MERI BLAZEVSKI is an artist and film editor. She holds a Master of Fine Art from RMIT and has an interest in storytelling, narrative structure, documentation and photography.

SHELLEY LASICA is an independent artist based in Melbourne. For more than 30 years, Shelley Lasica has pushed the confines of dance, choreography and performance. Her practice is defined by an enduring interest in the context and situations of presenting choreography.