On The Ballad of Bouncing Back
This is a piece of writing in response to a piece of writing in response to a performance that included a piece of writing. Please bear with me for a little preamble, as they all share the same name.
The Ballad of Bouncing Back is a work by Alec Katsourakis and InPlay Projects (myself included) performed twice in 2025. It included a section of spoken word in which the performers chanted a ballad by the same name. In their response to that dance work written for Live Collision Mag (and again titled the same), Charlie Lee wrote that
Ballads don’t have a known author. They are songs that tell stories, and pass their way down generations, collecting changes, moral attitudes, and reflections of values¹
This is an evocative passage, and it’s true… of real ballads, passed from port to port and embedding in themselves a shared cultural meaning. But for Katsourakis' The Ballad of Bouncing Back, we had to create one from scratch. This required a kind of facsimile of ballad development, an accelerated passing from generation to generation. It was, as with all InPlay works, a collaboration, but insofar as the Ballad of Bouncing Back has an author, that is me. So for the truly patient reader (my drafts of the ballad alone run to 11 pages), I would like to outline the development of the Ballad, and perhaps learn something along the way about language and collaboration.
The Ballad of Bouncing Back did not always contain an actual ballad. In its original conception, the work was called Jump’d, part of a double bill with its sister work, Floor’d. As the two works moved away from their binary opposition and grew into themselves, Katsourakis’ penchant for poetic and lengthy names asserted itself. As I understand it, the ‘ballad’ described the physical endurance and repetition of the dancers - from which the earnest meaning of the piece would derive - rather than a written or spoken component.
Katsourakis first introduced the idea of a poem to us on 18 April 2025. I remember the rehearsal well. Tired from a morning of the circuit-training style of repetition that was always the backbone of the work, Katsourakis invited us all to create some written responses for possible incorporation into the dancing. As collaborators, we took this in many directions, including abstract poetry and direct reporting of our experience. My notes contain lists of words like “jump”, “jab”, “bombard”, “budget back in black”, and underlined victoriously, “bodge!”². At the time, I was looking for works that shared or combined the ‘b’ and ‘j’ sounds of ‘bouncing’ and ‘jumping’. The centrality of rhythm in my interest can also be traced to this moment, which contains several attempts at crafting a limerick:
- . - - . - - A
- . - - . - - A
- . - B
- . - B
- . - - . - - A
There once was a Ballad of bounce Jack
Blue basketballs bobbing back
Juiced with their jumps,
Jackrabbits gyrate,
Bombarding Bob’s jobs by the blue and black³
As well as some more nonsensical pursuit of alliteration:
Ballad by banjo of jabbed jobs,
by lads back in Jackadgey,
Object bejewelled jumbo, just blue
Adjust Bob’s bodged budget back⁴
This rehearsal also established what would be a recurring tug-of-war between us as collaborators. I had a tendency towards a kind maximalist, strict adherence to a particular rhyming pattern or rhythm, while Katsourakis and others were focused on assigning the words a communicable meaning for the audience. I think this push and pull forged the ballad that we eventually used, which would have been weaker had it been the product of a single author. More broadly, it reflects my experience of the InPlay model of development; a recursive process, one step forward two steps back, guided by Katsourakis’ intuition and past successes. Indeed, what we tried that afternoon was an extension of an activity he had used in a previous work (Modals of Lost Opportunity), a rigorous process of tying movements to particular syllables. We slaved at it for hours only to eventually cut it from the work, just as each word and phrase we trialled that day didn’t make it into either of the two performance seasons.
What did form the one of the branches of the piece was Katsourakis’ first verse:
Bouncing balls go up and down
They fall and bounce and smack
Bound to fall, the balls and all,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
This remained almost unchanged for the rest of the writing process, and consistently formed the root of my extrapolations. In this way, Lee is correct that the ballad passed from Katsourakis’ mind into the communal space, where a multitude of hands continued to sculpt it.
The next record of the Ballad that I have is from 9 May 2025, and is the first time I can see the final version peeking through the cracks:
Bouncing balls go up and down,
They fall and bounce and smack
Bound to fall, the balls and all,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
Jumping jacks they jive & bump bump & jive ->bump?->bounce off->the floor
As life begins to crack
Watch as? these five four form become? a (come alive?) -> PERFORM FOR MORE
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
skating chafing Skuffing skips are getting big beset by sleet
Begin to fade a? their? fading? to black
Again they meet, get to their feet,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back⁵
Shakespeare often wrote in iambic pentameter (five pairs of syllables with the second syllable of each pair stressed), as did a strong lineage of English language poets. What is so interesting to me is that, entirely unconsciously, we as a group of dancers invented a kind of ‘iambic quadmeter’ (four pairs of syllables with the first syllable of each pair stressed) which mimics the rhythms of dance phrases we have known all our lives: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 &. Re-read Katsourakis’ first stanza with the rhythm in mind, imagining an unstressed half-beat rest at the end of the second and fourth lines:
Bouncing balls go up and down,
They fall and bounce and smack (-)
Bound to fall, the balls and all,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back (-)
Before the first performance of The Ballad of Bouncing Back, a 20-minute version at the Coburg Courthouse on 16-17 May 2025, we continued to develop the Ballad, expanding it to five stanzas, and occasionally straying from the rhyming patterns in order to have each stanza comment on the arc of the dancing (a sense of sports-like repetition, then a fraying of the group, before bouncing back together):
Bouncing balls go up and down
They fall and bounce and smack
Bound to fall, the balls and all:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
Jack jives the jazzy jaunt
As Jill jumps the jack
Down and down they feel the taunt:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
Jumping jacks fall to the floor
As life begins to crack
Watch these four perform for more:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
Scuffing skips are not so neat
They start to fade to black
Again they meet, get to their feet:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
If hate’s a lake then hope’s a river
Resist the call to attack
The flow of fate quakes and quivers
The Ballad of Bouncing Back
In the performance, we said this poem at the end of the work while dancing a petit allegro phrase, the movement and words together testing our endurance and capacity to work together. It worked well and the audience responded positively.
But I wasn’t happy.
There was barely a clear rhyming pattern - ABCB DBEB and so on. There were also moments when multiple syllables had to be squashed into a single beat… try saying the following out loud quickly: If hate’s a lake then hope’s a river/Resist the call to attack. Finally, the second verse stood out to me as not carrying a really meaning beyond the sound of the ‘j’s. I set to work outside of rehearsals, tinkering.
By 28 June 2025 I had a ballad of eight stanzas. Some, including the first, had light alterations:
Bouncing balls they rise up tall,
Then crash down with a smack.
Bound to fall, the balls and all,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Others were completely new, such as the seventh:
Now our crew has come apart,
We feel a profound lack.
So we chart the heart’s restart,
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
This version was strictly pure. Every single syllable fit into the pattern, and each stanza’s third line followed the triple rhyme that Katsourakis had discovered in his original (in the above example: So we chart the heart’s restart).
When I brought this back to the group and we recited together, we could hear the overlapping words where changes had been made - habit overriding what their eyes saw. It was as if we townsfolk from different villages gathering for the seasonal market, sharing something familiar with a flair from our local dialect.
This process continued. Katsourakis, one eye on clarity for the audience (the mantra was, after all, one of the final images the audience would receive in the work), bargained me down from my extremist perch. The final document, which we had with us on stage, still had one alteration handwritten over it - the artefact remained alive right through our season to closing night.
At the end of the work, after an extensive, cyclical, and upbeat dance section, we stood in a line like a victorious sports team singing our anthem. As I stood there with my collaborators and co-performers, there was something moving about the feeling of singing it - this thing we had fabricated had become real. Some of us had been there since the beginning, others had joined along the way, and still others were felt as phantom bodies who had danced with us but not on that night. For every hour I had poured into these particular words, my friends had worked at their duo choreographies, our tricky tennis section, the angle of the shoulder joint in every arm shape, or integrating the camera. Arms around each others’ shoulders, we sang our anthem, we chanted our mantra, we recited our prayer. We sung our ballad.
Bouncing balls they rise up tall,
Then crash down with a smack.
Bound to fall, the balls and all:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Jumping like those balls at height,
We’re mastering the knack.
There’s no plight, we feel alright:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Help us find our jumping trance
As joy begin to crack.
Hold our stance, find endurance:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Scuffing skips no longer neat,
Our vision fades to black.
Still we meet, get to our feet:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Each of us appears so keen
As we move down the track.
But, unseen, we are so mean:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Though we tried to form a team,
We could not bind the pack.
Prone to scheme, fight for a dream:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Hope’s a river, hate’s a lake,
We won’t turn to attack.
Though we ache, we shake awake:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back.
Hope’s a river, hate’s a lake,
We won’t turn to attack.
Though we ache, we shake awake:
The Ballad of Bouncing Back!
¹Lee, C, ‘The Ballad of Bouncing Back’, livecollision [blog post] (no date,2025), https://livecollision.cargo.site/the-ballad-of-bouncing-back-1, accessed 2/2/2026
²Macdougall Di Manno, R, personal notes, 18 April 2025
³Macdougall Di Manno, R, personal notes, 18 April 2025
⁴Macdougall Di Manno, R, personal notes, 18 April 2025
⁵Macdougall Di Manno, R, personal notes, 9 May 2025
