Friday 21st June, Lime Tree Theatre
5pm: Keynote Presentation: Professor Susan Kozel: Affective Choreographies
(T116 Lime Tree Theatre)
If archiving dance is seen to be a choreography of affect then an archive breaks away from being simply documentation and becomes an ongoing affective exchange between the dancer, the archival material and those who receive the flow of movement over time. Affect, a rich philosophical and material concept, can seem opaque; and the methods for accessing and working with affect can be evasive. How is it possible to handle such conceptual and material ambiguity? Using Conspiracy Archives (2019) the Mixed Reality Choreographic Archive of Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir’s performance “Conspiracy Ceremony – HYPERSONIC STATES” (2017), this keynote intends to materialize some aspects of affect and to offer glimpses of subtle but profound methods for accessing affect: as a choreographer, a reflective practitioner or a sentient being.
6.15pm: Liz Roche, Ruth Gibson and Jenny Roche: Pre performance presentation: Essences of I/Thou (Lime Tree Theatre Stage)
What if the performance is not the end…but a means to an end. The end result is further along. This pre performance presentation/sharing with the audience for I/Thou outlines findings from a three day research process into I/Thou as a ‘work’, which involved excavating traces, essences, meanings and perceptions that are not overtly revealed in performance. Liz Roche, Ruth Gibson and Jenny Roche, in dialogue with the dancers, mine the various threads of the process which led to I/Thou from a range of angles to draw out other entry points, manifestations and possible outcomes through which an audience can engage in various ways with the underlying structures (material and intangible) of the work.
7pm: Light Refreshments on the Slí (Lime Tree Theatre)
8pm: Performance: Liz Roche Company: I/Thou (Lime Tree Theatre)
9.15pm: Wine reception on the Slí (Lime Tree Theatre)
Saturday 22nd June, Irish World Academy Building
Exhibition throughout the day: Artist books and film (IWAMD Foyer)
10am to 6pm: Alys Longley: Two Artist-Books from the Mistranslation Laboratory
Mistranslation Laboratory is an artistic research project that exists in performance, artist-book and video form. The artist books bring together fragments of performance writing, poetry and photography which were created in intimate performances. This research engages strategies from dance, theatre, creative writing and visual art to explore the co-extensiveness of bodies of different kinds.
10am to 10.30am: Paula Guzzanti
Dancing-languaging oscillations: Workshop (IW2.25)
This workshop will offer an opportunity for movers to experiment with the use of dance and voice improvisation, and the use of phones to film, record, and overlap the material. The workshop will involve participants working in pairs and producing a multi-media material that will offer them an alternative way to document movement improvisation. The workshop is open to experienced improvisers as well as artist from other disciplines.
Note: please bring your mobile phones fully charged, and with memory space to film image and record voice to facilitate the workshop. There will be some extra filming/recording devices but it’s important that participants work with their own technology.
Lineages and legacies: Performative lecture (Theatre 1)
10.40am to 11.20am: Jean Butler
Tension of Lineage, Legacy, Appropriation and Representation in the Irish (step)Dancing Body
In July 2018 Our Steps Foundation initiated Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy in partnership with the New York Public Library of Performing Arts (NYPLPA) Jerome Robbins Dance Division with support from Glucksman Ireland House NYU. Our Steps, Our Story is the first archive created for the recovery and recording of the solo steps and stories of Irish step dance master practitioners and style influencers from An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha. Under the direction of Jean Butler, in excess of 80 hours of video were recorded, 11 oral histories collected and over 25 solo dances recreated; the archived information dates from 1950- 1994 and traces a lineage and dancing bloodline from Belfast to N.Y. Confidently placing the Irish (step)dancing body, past and present, under meticulous examination, this archive values the form as a living history, as a collective container of embodied knowledge, and as site for creative exchange. This is the first of four planned international archive residencies, a second one in NYPLPA June 2019 and two in Dublin in 2020.Our Steps, Our Story is also the source material for a simultaneous creative project, The Stepping Fields (TSF), due to premiere in Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy in 2021. TSF is an installation event with an immersive choreographic performance by an international, intergenerational cast including twenty local Irish step dancers. The next research phase of TSF, in collaboration with Jacob’s Pillow and The Park Avenue Armory, is to mine the archive material across choreographic, written, and film experiments to produce both physical, intellectual and visual content. This multidisciplinary approach and team include Cori Olinghouse (TSF dramaturg and living archives collaborator), Siobhan Burke (TSF writer-in-residence), Kristyn Fontanella (contemporary dancer/choreographer) and Caitlin Clark (traditional Irish step dancer). This lecture demonstration is created from the findings from these upcoming residencies.
Capturing dancing: dancing experiences and digital archives (scholarly presentations (Theatre 1)
11.20am to 12.20pm
Argyro Tsampazi: A Journey Through Ascetic Rituals and Dance Movement: The diaries
This paper discusses the method of capturing dancers’ experiences during three artistic residencies which resulted in the creation of three autonomous choreographic pieces. The residencies constituted the practical part of my PhD research which explores the effects of the application of Orthodox Ascetic Practices to Choreographic Processes and Dance Performance. Practices such as fasting, silence, meditation, working in the night, keeping a personal diary and confiding feelings to an assigned person were engaged in by the groups of dancers. The model of the choreographic process used during the residencies was ‘Process 3’ from the Didactic-Democratic framework model Jo Butterworth proposes in her article ‘Too many Cooks? A framework for dance making and devising’. According to the proposed model, the choreographer works as a pilot and the dancer as a contributor. The choreographer initiates the concept, directs, sets and develops tasks through improvisation or imagery and shapes the material that ensues. The dancer has to be able to replicate movement, develop the content, improvise and respond to tasks. (2009, p:187). In this case the participants’ contribution was vital for the creation of the final choreographic pieces as the dancers offered movement material and shared personal experiences, memories, feelings and thoughts to be used as a source of inspiration. Along with the discussion of the above-mentioned process the paper will also explore the concept of diaries used as a tool for capturing the experience of dance making. In this research project the diaries were of great importance as the dancers used them inside and outside the studio in order to depict their every-day feelings and thoughts and complete choreographic tasks. The material gathered from them is extremely rich and includes pieces of writing, automatic writing, notes and drawings.
Erica Charalambous: The journey of an item through the virtual landscape of dance archives.
Since starting my PhD research into ‘the archival transformation of dance’ at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University UK, May 2017 (as part of a cotutelle agreement with Deakin University, Melbourne), my fascination about dance and archives has only deepened. In my research I am investigating three very different cases of archives of dance: 1) TanzArchiv Leipzig e.V an archival dance collection in Germany, 2) Siobhan Davies RePlay ‘born digital online archive in the UK, and 3) Lucy Guerin Inc dance archive in Australia in both physical (hard copy) and virtual (digital collections) platforms. My research has become an inquisitive play between ‘active’ materials (texts, objects, virtual realms and other forces) and the ‘actors’ in the archive ‘becoming’ interchangeably visible and invisible in both physical and digital archival topographies. For this presentation, I would like to discuss some of the limits and challenges I have experienced and encountered during observing and contributing to the organisation and orchestration of the Lucy Guerin Inc ‘living’ archive. Additionally, my ethnographic approach and active participation in the digital ‘happenings’ of this case study have blurred the boundaries of using and reading an archive. Moreover, the process and events of migration of the archival content into multi-layered relational platforms of online databases and networks are not always in a simpatico relationship. There seems to be an interesting tension in archives of dance between the record keeping system (the systematic and systemic), the content (ephemeral matters and uncategorizable items) and the generation of hybrid strategies according to location, cultural memory and the people invested in these collections. What does the journey a single item; a performance remain; a dancing trace; through these archival digital and non-digital topographies reveal about choreographic practices and the archive?
Imagined Choreographies: Performance (Theatre 2)
12.30pm to 1pm
lana Reynolds and Sabrina Huth: Dance with Me – A fictional duet and anarchival act of embodying what’s absent.
How can we encounter each other without being in the same time-space? What do we share and what do we leave behind? Collectively investigating topics of absence, the space in-between and interpersonal fictions under the constraint they never physically meet, Ilana and Sabrina share a repertory of material and immaterial traces of each other’s absences. They explore how absence presents a stronger agency to act and how the traces of another’s absence create a fictional body. Through this process, they co-create interpersonal fictional realities – such as the site-specific, performative installation “You are here”(January 2019) in which they transformed the same space, a former shop window in Amsterdam, at different times, into an ever-changing anarchival space arranging and rearranging objects, materials and bodies. During the symposium Ilana and Sabrina aim to feed forward their research into a second performative expression – Dance with Me – in which they search for how to move in, from and with the present absence of the other. By keeping the fact to never meet, in this version of their research Ilana and Sabrina synchronically inhabit different spaces at the same time. Ilana is present at the symposium with a live projection of Sabrina, who is present at the Nieuw Dakota gallery space in Amsterdam with a live projection of Ilana. Through this set up, they refer to the immateriality of the moving body in order to continue questioning how the other’s absence creates new creative acts and encounters. As a result, anarchiving is approached as a framework to create a process-oriented performance space – a shared event that performs the idea of the other’s absence. Documentation is considered as a multi-temporal process, which is alive within the body that experiences it and can respond and relate to its materiality and immateriality in order to create a new and shared action with others.
1pm to 2pm Lunch (The Pavilion)
Documenting Practice/s (Theatre 1)
2pm to 3.30pm
Susan Sentler: Dissolving the index
The point of departure of my artistic practice lies in the image as both a still and moving fragment, tangential and emergent with my environment. While tangential, the image is honed through a dialogue with multiple modes of somatic embodiment. I use the image, as well as the dancer’s body, a fusion of matter and material that morphs into a textured, improvisational porous mosaic. What is captured, as trace, as archive, each mode an intrinsic part of the somatic process, ultimately dissolving its identity, its index, and collapsing into the work itself. Process weaves into performance, and performance into process; a transformation from merely ‘seeing’ to creating an emergent performative reality. Within this presentation I will unpick this mode of making in 2 works. One created in 2013, See, Sea. The other signs of a nest created in 2017. Both installations orchestrating still and moving image, sound, object as well as absence and presence of live performance. The process and performance become one…a vibrant collaged, curated documentation. Improvisation is used in the making, as well as alive in the performance. The technological tools hold not only the exploration of development but are necessary in the visibility of the performance. Archive emerging as process and performance.
Evelyn Jamieson: Collaborative ‘spaces’: In Concert
Collaborative practice in dance has been the central focus of my research since 2000 and it is very much within the over-arching focus concerning the concept of a living archive. Creative collaboration in performance making is a shared, mutually dependent, and dialogical approach. It is my view that through shared ownership, one can create a truly collective endeavour “It is about crossing boundaries, entering another space together” (Jamieson, 2011, p. 37). My research investigates how we enter this space together and the ‘dialogue’ that ensues in terms of what the individual artists bring to the space – it greater than the sum of the two parts (Landy and Jamieson, 2000, p. 2). As we work together, we are a living, breathing archive, in the moment. The stimulus for the case study and investigation was based on a simple idea of three concepts when making this performance work together – walking, sitting and standing. This has formed the basis of the creative process and the outcome, In Concert as a living archive. Furthermore, this investigation brings to the fore what Etienne Wenger describes as a community of practice in the devising and performing of this collaborative space. This project would not have been possible without the shared ideas, mutual understanding and critical insight of my MA Dance students.
Lucinda Coleman: Water droplets: documentation of site-dance in situ
In August 2018, three members of the Australian dance collective, Remnant Dance, were awarded a Nature, Art and Habitat Residency (NAHR), in the Taleggio Valley, Italy. The focus of the residency was to develop site-specific dance material in response to the waters of the region. The key theme of this presentation is how traces of site-specific dance might be received and valued through process documentation, as illustrated in the NAHR case study. Our danced responses, to the natural Enna River system of the Valley, were documented on location via film, photography and reflexive writing. Daily reflections on the site-dance experiences were shared on the Remnant Dance weblog, La goccia del giorno/The drop of the day, during the three-week residency. The process was shaped by three research questions, generated on site in the Taleggio Valley. Firstly, how might the water make choreographic decisions for the body, and secondly, how does the experience of the water shaping the body, change the body? Finally, how might we invite audience engagement with the water as choreographer/director? Our initial sensory response however, was to structural elements of the water in the space: the sound, smell, shape, and form of liquid pathways lit by sun and shadows. The danced interactions of body and site were ephemeral: our momentary engagements an aesthetic exchange. Documentation of such traces became critical for exploring dance-making processes in situ. The Remnant Dance NAHR experience ruptured our well-intended objectives through sensory engagement with the waters of the region, leaving dancers stained with the essence of place. At the close of the residency, the short dance film, Performing Water, was made to archive curated clips of site-specific dance-making endeavours. The remnants of collective site-specific dance linger, as traces within ourselves, yet there also remains the shadow of collective choreographic practice, now on film.
3.30pm to 3.45pm Tea/Coffee (IWAMD Foyer)
3.45pm to 5.30pm Processes of Capture in an Extended Field (Theatre 1)
Lisa McLoughlin: The Kindness of Strangers
This paper and accompanying film will outline and discuss the experience of being performer, archivist and researcher in the Irish Arts Council funded performance The kindness of Strangers. Documenting a durational street performance in five cities in Ireland, I place my body at the mercy of the kindness of strangers, creating a symbolic equation of care and dependency. The modes of capture are threefold, via memory recall, live footage from the perspective of the film maker, finally, my autoethnographic response to the physical toil that I will go through, prior to a spontaneous street performance. This action research culminated in a performance, commissioned by LIVE COLLISION festival of live art in April 2019.
A collaboration with Maths Professor John McLoughlin of the University of New Brunswick, The kindness of strangers, looks to create a mathematical equation of dependency. As an artist, a mother, spouse, daughter and member of a rural community, I carry the weight of my three children, aging parents and depend heavily on those around me to help me carry my responsibilities. This is the lived equation of dependency and care. I bring this equation back into my body, the body that does this work and ask for the help I need to carry this and place myself at the mercy of “the kindness of strangers”. This is the second performance of my Arts Practice PhD from the University of Limerick entitled “The Autonomy Project- An arts practice investigation of autonomy and dependency in a time of change”.
Kim vom Kothen: A Transient Space – Filming Dance
This presentation answers to the symposium’s interest in “capturing creative process” and “archiving process traces which continue to inform future creations”. The proposed presentation interlinks an analysis of intent with reflections on my recent studio-based research. As a filmmaker and photographer, I am interested in how cinematic film affords the inscription of the dancer’s embodied knowledge of choreographic works in the context of archiving dance. I investigate how film might contribute to a dance-specific way to build an archive of dance works? Alternatively, as UK choreographer Siobhan Davies puts it in an interview with dance scholar Scott deLahunta: ‘[to] archive the substantiality of a choreographic thought even when it is translated by different performers, in different times and contexts’ (Davies 2016).The research question being addressed is: how can film incorporate distinct characteristics of dance making, for example, process thinking, reliance on embodied knowledge of dancers in rehearsals, remounting and transmission of choreographic works? The studio-based research explores the role of kinaesthetic empathy in the relation between dancer and filmmaker during the recording of choreographed movement. How can the dancer’s internal experience of movement be translated into film? How does a dancer-centred view during the process of filming impact the process of filming itself and the outcomes of this process? The presentation will feature video excerpts and still-images to account for observations and discoveries that emerged from these iterative one-to-one explorations. Following Peggy Phelan, who asserts, ‘Representation is almost always on the side of the one who looks and almost never on the side of the one who is seen’ (Phelan 1993: 25), I suggest that exploring and adapting dance artists’ perspectives on process, outputs, values and usability relating to visual material might impact accessibility, presentation, and interaction of archived dance.
Grant McLay: Entangled Moments: Capturing rugby movement to create choreographic scores.
This presentation illustrates a research process that used elements taken from an elite sporting competition, in this case an international Rugby Union match, to develop choreographic tools to create a new contemporary dance work. The main physical traits identified in this complex environment, demonstrate the potentials of entanglement, directional changeability and interlocking struggle. A single- use notation system was created to correlate data derived from the frame by frame analysis of the rugby match. From this database elements were identified and converted into set representational, or abstract choreographic tools called Movement Signatures and Blocks. These choreographic stimuli resulted in the formation of movement scores and an abstract movement vocabulary to inform the choreographic creation of a non-traditional research output called Fields of Play. As this hybrid movement vocabulary evolved, qualities of de-centred logic and interruption of flow were revealed and explored further. This practice-led study also utilized elements of Laban Movement Analysis and sports movement analysis approaches to movement to develop this experimental approach to movement capture.
Mostafa Yarmahmoudi: E-Motion Capture & Spirituality in a technological age
My paper’s argument lies in the field of contemporary multimedia in Western Countries. (United States, Australia and UK). It focuses on spirituality and the use of technology and computer generated imagery in performance development. At the turn of this new century, many interests in related fields (film, digital arts, science and technology, design, engineering, medicine, communications, etc.) further our understanding of the complementary thinking processes that drive new interdisciplinary research and conceptual models influenced by the computer’s information processing capabilities and the internet’s global reach. This movement has grown from a small, but burgeoning group of choreographers, performers, and media artists who experimented with computer-assisted work linking performance and new technologies. This has now developed into a growing network of collaborative projects spurning internet discussions both enthusiastic and contentious. These are examples: Merce Cunningham (U.S.A) has utilized the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities. Virtual performance installation is derived from generating, optical motion capture a computer hardware and software digital 3-D representation of recorded moving bodies. In recording sessions, cameras surround is fed the performer and track sensors (attached to the body) in time and space; this information to a central workstation for consolidation into a single data file. Motion capture files subsequently drive the movement of simulated figures on the computer, where they can be merged, connected, re-sequenced and mapped onto other anatomies in an animation program called Character Studio. With this tool the animator- director is able to draw out and reconfigure the abstracted motions and trajectories of the performance, or the ghost of the performance. This is one example of motion capture. I think it is not only a new technology but it is very useful for our country, especially, I will argue in field of spirituality. Similarly, Stelarc in Australia and Drs. Broadhurst and Bowden in UK are doing this type of work using different techniques. In the different but related field Andrew Newberg, a psychologist in USA, is researching into the effects of meditation on our brain. While the meditator focuses intently on a single image (usually a religious symbol), after about an hour the meditator feels something similar to a loss of boundary and a sense of oneness developing. This signals the researchers to inject a radioactive tracer through an intravenous line into one arm. Within minutes the tracer has bound fast to the brain in greater amounts where the bloods flows, and hence brain activity, had been higher. Later a scanner would measure the distribution of the tracer to yield a snapshot of brain activity (as a radiology picture). Can we animate and generate images from these radiology scanner pictures? Can we pursue other effects of different emotions, for example: different acting or spiritual emotions on our brain and capture the scanner pictures? If yes, can we animate and generate images and approach a new term such as E-Motion capture? These are the questions, which this research has followed.
5.30 to 6pm A Playful Mode of Capture/a Writing – Moving Practice: Workshop and Wrap up of the day (IW2.25)
Jenny Roche and Róisín O’Gorman
In this session Roisin O’Gorman and Jenny Roche will lead a process that engages participants as ‘apparatuses of capture’ of the conference content so far. Using movement, writing and interview tasks, they will lead the group to develop a communal mapping of experiences, ideas, concepts, sensations, movements and images that linger after the day’s events. A provocation for this process will be given at the beginning of the day on Saturday.
Dance Limerick
7.30pm to 9.30pm
Performance: Lucia Kickham: “This is Me Trying to Communicate” (danced by Lucia Kickham and Ailish Maher)
This is Me, Trying to Communicate looks at the concept of Lingua Franca, a language that is adopted and used systematically to make communication possible between people who do not share a native language. It explores the communicative power of the dancing body as one such language. The performers play with the buoyant space between the abstract and the concrete; linking movement to spoken language, decoding and physicalising aural utterings, translating vocal dynamics into dynamic movement conversations.
This is me, trying to communicate.
This is me, talking to you in a language that you do not speak yet understand.
This is me, taking borrowed words and making them my own. This is me, threading the edges of conversation.
This is me, tasting the space between us. This is me, tuning in,
Tuning in to you.
Developed with the support of Dance Limerick through a Percolate Residency
Vegetarian Buffet
Performance: Sally Doughty, Lisa Kendall and Rachel Krische “Please do Touch”
Collaborating on a research project titled Body of Knowledge, dance artist/academics Sally Doughty, Lisa Kendall and Rachel Krische interrogate how the dancer can be considered as a living archive to generate new performance work. Please Do Touch is one outcome of this project. Conceived to be performed in gallery or museum spaces, it privileges ourselves as rich artefacts and challenges traditional notions of what an archive might be. Please Do Touch aims to provoke the audiences’ personal memories as we recall and share our own histories through improvised movement, spoken and sung responses. We consider how embodied memory can be resonant and rich in history, and how active re-calling provokes the re- emergence of what was once ‘forgotten’ concurrently with the emergence of new configurations of embodied response/thinking to generate new performance. As Brian Massumi observes, ‘[our memories’] reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration’ (2016: 6) and thus our practice is conceived of as ‘an anarchive’ (Massumi 2016: 6). Please Do Touch opens up debate around the body as an archive: what it means to document/generate, re-call and re-configure our histories (in the now) and how transferable this thinking can be to a non-dancing body.
Sunday 23rd June @ Irish World Academy Building
9.30 to 10am: Dancing-languaging oscillations: Follow up from workshop: Paula Guzzanti (Theatre 2)
10 to 11.30am: Archive as Capture and Choreographic Resource (Theatre 1)
Renate Braeuninger: What have and can choreographers learn from music and musicology?
My research concentrates mainly on the choreographies of George Balanchine and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Both have used music as the main source of their choreographic inspiration, has this link to music influenced the way they preserved and archived their work? Both choreographers have and are placing a great effort on the way their choreography is transmitted and their legacy is preserved. In both instances the focus seems not so much on the authentic staging of a work, but rather on providing means to guarantee a specific performance practice and transmission of the work from generation to generation. Balanchine was the first choreographer to make a will that assigns his choreographies to certain people and determines the way in which they are staged with future generations of dancers through a foundation. Additionally, a large range of his works have been notated. De Keersmaeker has published a series of multimedia scores that document some of her choreography and explain the underlying processes. What aspects are in each instance kept that others can restage works or that the practice can be transmitted to others? What role does the idea of archive play for both artists and their legacy? In which way are oral and haptic practices incorporated here in the manner the archive is organised (see Nancy Reynold’s oral archive project of some of Balanchine’s early choreographies, which has not been initiated by him, but is set up in cooperation with the Balanchine Foundation, and de Keersmaeker’s score publications)? How are modes of preservation informed by practices used in music, for example, an understanding of the importance of performance traditions as an additional source to recordings as well as the pros and cons of the critical edition for the re-staging of choreography?
Jools Gilson & Lucia Kickham: Listening to Remembering and Forgetting – audio embodied archives.
In this performative presentation, Jools Gilson & Lucia Kickham choreograph listening with recorded and live conversations about remembering and forgetting. Amongst other choreographies for your ears, this presentation uses Philip Connaughton’s recent work Assisted Solo (2018) to discuss and perform the documentation of process in contemporary dance practice (including Kickham’s This is Me Trying to Communicate). Assisted Solo (in which Kickham performed) inflects embodied remembering as the expert creative practice of dance, through narratives of aging and elder care, anchored in the story of Connaughton’s mother who has dementia. In one of the early sections of the piece, the French dance artist Magali Caillet-Gajan performs a solo with a compelling and driven intensity. It isn’t until we’re in the bar afterwards listening to the after-show talk, that we find out that this extraordinary section of performance is itself a meditation on memory (as dementia also is), a sequence (for all the dancers) of excerpting sixty different gestures from choreographic works they’ve been in during their professional lives. For Connaughton, this is as much as he can remember before his head explodes (his words). For Caillet-Gajan, she does another sixty to make 120, in a tumult of quick emotional and gestural shifts. In Assisted Solo, Connaughton re-casts dementia as a shift in embodiment, rather than a brain disease, in a double gesture of remembering and forgetting. This work provides provocative insight into dance’s troubled relationship to documenting process, as well as the dance archive’s love affair with product. In this presentation Jools Gilson and Lucia Kickham present together in tangles of talking / listening about choreographing dancers as well as words. Framed within a broader context of theorising about archival strategies for dance, or what Sarah Whatley calls ‘intangible cultural heritage’, this presentation aims to linger on the traces of a making process in dance in ways which trouble both remembering and forgetting.
Rachel Sweeney: Migrating Gestures: Body Weather as a cartographic process within interdisciplinary pedagogy
This paper will focus broadly on the somatic aspects of the Japanese movement practice Body Weather as placed within an interdisciplinary and embodied approach, drawing from recent creative pedagogy case studies in site specific projects that promote artistic dialogue across science, and education disciplines involving re-imagining landscape. The paper will apply new modes of critically readdressing themes of altered landscapes and human migration, using creative capture methods to include Body Mapping, Improvisational Scores and Somatic Experiencing. The research on offer here advocates a sensuous scholarship that phenomenologically frames dance and science discourses surrounding materiality, corporeality and spatiality (Kramer 2015). My own ethnographic approach to movement is informed by the related practices of Butoh and Body Weather, which I locate as ideographic-somatic languages, and which share a socio-historic root in post war Japan. This paper seeks to engage a coercive tactics in exploring language mechanisms that are located through the senses in order to support fluid and migrational codes when accessing the dance body. The scene of movement proposed here seeks an affective engagement between somatic education, collective expression and the ensuing cross disciplinary languages that may emerge. Both writer Andre Lepecki and choreographer Boris Charmatz extend the scope of the proposed research project to include current debates within critical choreographic practice to include self-inscription, eco-kinetic knowledge and ephemerality – all terms that can be usefully applied to a philosophical underpinning of the terms gesture and transmigration. Both usefully compound notions of dance as a codified expression while presenting fresh alternatives to modes of viewing transformative staged behaviour as a performance trope in and of itself.
11.45 to 1pm: Somatic Encounters on both sides of the lens: Workshop (IW2.25) Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson
Both the act of moving and that of capturing movement is a dynamic encounter, a connection that embodies somatic and artistic elements. The camera is motivated by the mover, thus choreographing (altering) space and time. Sighted and sensed, the mover’s somatic sensibilities also are affected by the relationship. In this workshop, participants each will play dual roles – as mover and as captor. The group first will be guided through a somatic exploration of body folding – an improvisational movement form which derives from creative process work called Human Origami, developed by Sentler and Batson. Then, in duos, each partner will play the role of video recorder and mover. Movers will be given instructions on how to re-enter and recapture choice elements of the previous movement session. Using a cell phone, their partners will record the activity as a journey diary, or automatic writing through the camera. The footage not to be ‘edited’ allowing the filming to flow, choosing points of departure and closure ‘in the moment’. After switching roles, the partners will share their experience of each role in the creative process. Finally, we’ll come together as a whole to reflect on and discuss the interweaving of the phenomenological and the digital.
1pm to 2pm: Food for thought: Lunch, tea/coffee and wrap up (IWAMD Foyer)