Swansong: How do I begin again and again

Swansong - how do I begin again and again
This film presents Marsh, a 50-year-old disabled dancer, in conversation with a series of outdoor sites marked by architectural decay and abandonment and persistent natural growth. Shot across multiple locations, the work uses crumbling facades, overgrown thresholds, structures that persist despite abandonment, as a point of departure for thinking about temporality, ageing and disability within contemporary dance practice.
Marsh postulates that contemporary dance's dominant logic, oriented around virtuosic capacity and an assumption of bodily norms, renders older and disabled practitioners structurally precarious. Swansong seeks to problematise the framing of both ruin and the ageing disabled body through the lens of loss, proposing instead that persistence, rather than decline, might be understood as their shared condition.
Marsh’s movement vocabulary is generated in response to site: moving on uneven ground, stillness held against wind and open sky. Nature's ruin, roots splitting stone, moss claiming brick, becomes a choreographic counterpoint as evidence of ongoing, unruly life. This formal dialogue between body and site works to unsettle the assumption that decay and disappearance go hand in hand.
The film's title carries this tension. A swansong conventionally marks an ending, a final performance before disappearance. Here, the term is acknowledged and contested in equal measure the work resists elegising the dancer's practice, offering instead an act of continued becoming, unhurried and on autonomous terms.
Filmed across several outdoor locations in 2025, the work forms part of Marsh's ongoing enquiry into crip time, precarity and presence, and sits alongside her collaborative and written work on agency and disability in dance.