Mimicking his Golden Labrador Lara while they both wear neck ruffs made from rolls of toilet paper, is the Covid-19 lockdown project of New Zealand academic and performance artist Dr Mark Harvey.
Mark Harvey Photo: Supplied
Let's Share the Ground Together involves a lot of sitting, lying down, sniffing and exploring the backyard, with Lara firmly in charge of the action.
He wanted to use home time to create a work about the pandemic, but from an unusual and absurd perspective, something in which he specialises.
Enter - Lara.
"We appear to have spread this virus from the animal kingdom, so I wanted to explore the lives of animals around us, in this case, the life of my dog - to follow my dog, to see things from her perspective."
He decked them both out in 'Elizabethan' ruffs fashioned out of rolls of toilet paper, famously the most in demand grocery item in the early days of the pandemic panic.
In the course of following Lara around the backyard on all fours, he says he learnt a lot from seeing the world from her point of view.
"Dogs are very nimble, so it's difficult to emulate the way they move. Keeping your nose to the ground, and being on the alert all the time, is really hard work!"
His daughter Tui filmed them while ,his other daughter, Sanne, kept Lara moving by waving around a dog treat off-camera.
"Lara is a Labrador, so it's all about the food," he says.
Usually Harvey would be in the lecture halls at the University of Auckland where he's a senior lecturer in dance studies.
He says adapting to teaching online has had its challenges for him and his students.
"It's a big concern is that not all students have same online access, which is something we're working on," he says. "But our students are coming up with all sorts of work that responds to their current environment, using PPE, for instance, or playing on living in their own personal bubble.
"The challenges our students are currently facing is also producing some really exciting and interesting performance art and choreography right now."
As an artist, Harvey wants to encourage people to think about big issues through his absurdist projects.
In February this year he invited thousands of people to help him to manually shift a shipping container. He says We Can Shift the World Together was designed to explore what motivates people to do the things they do, or don't do. It was performed on the Wellington waterfront as part of the Performance Arcade.
"Of course I'm interested in the big questions, on how to make the world a better place - but also how we can we connect people around these big issues, to explore what motivates people to consider and act on issues such as climate change, colonisation and inequality, but by taking a sideways rather than didactic approach."
In 2017, in a performance called Guilty Patch performed in Christchurch and Sydney, he invited people to lie down with him on a round carpet and exchange guilt stories in confidence.
"It's amazing what people told me. But I can't tell you what they told me," Harvey says.
I first came across his work when he spoke to me about a project he created for the 2013 Venice Art Biennale, that involved wrestling with strangers.
For Political Climate Wrestle , Harvey dressed up as a businessman and approached strangers in the street to argue with him about climate change and politics and to wrestle with him (in accordance with OSH guidelines).
He went on to perform Political Climate Wrestle around the world.
"Humour is a useful way to get people thinking about those big world topics, and to engage with members of the public, not just art audiences," he says.
"It's really important to me that public performance is a learning experience, something that we can grow and learn from, from a position where we each feel valued. That might sound a bit 'feel-good', but it's about encouraging people to think about what we can do without isolating them or simply telling them they have done something bad. Art has an extremely important role in our society in this way, which is usually ignored and undervalued."
