Items where Subject is "Dance"

Celebrating the interplay between dance and mark making, this performance presents the conclusion of a participatory research project led by AUB academics Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley with community dance company Co-Evo. The Moving Canvas Project explores the kinesthetic inhabitance of wearable canvasses marked with pens to create unique and original textile design whilst creating choreography.

This visual essay will explore the themes of collaboration, play, the digital intermediatory space and how we engage with the digital ‘other’ of yourself. The research builds on the work of Stark Smith's The Underscore (1987). This long-form dance improvisation structure is used to frame the creative journey which takes place within a jam session offers a platform to explore and consider how the experience might be re-framed with in an online context. The research also draws upon the writing of Weber, Mizanty & Allen (2017) who present digital conference tools as a method to create and teach choreography, and Francksen’s writing around how the use of digital technology produces the digital body, which can interact with the performative body (2014). The research further extends the understanding of these digital spaces as places for intangible, ephemeral, and communal play. This new practice gave a chance for reflection on both our artistic practices and our lives during the pandemic; Halprin’s Life/Art Process has been a supportive model for understanding the therapeutic nature of jamming practice (1995). The drawings and short films created during this project document the process, but also have currency as individual artefacts. The observations and recommendations below will be presented alongside empirical research about the relationship between the artists’ practice and how through drawing and movement they found beneficial creative exchange, in a temporary digital space.

This film explores the relationship between the free expression of improvised drawing and the intertwined practice of movement and music in what we frame as ‘creative jamming’. The film tracks the journey from studio-based improvisation jamming to on-line practice imposed by the onset of the 2020 pandemic which forced remote working and collaboration. Our sites of encounter shifted from performance spaces to our home environments, where multiple spaces were simultaneously connected using technology. Through the practice we discovered that bodies, objects, materials and movement could be shared, replicated, recycled and mirrored back to us. The film observes how the pandemic opened new spaces for play, imagination and world building; the adaption of practice from live to digital performance breeds both difference and familiarity. No longer inhabiting the same physical space, this new environment, created and framed by the lens of the laptop and phone camera, holds the practice somewhere between different houses creating a catalyst for new observations and inquiry. The film demonstrates that the gap created by the COVID-19 lockdown bought with it new creative elements including using the technology as a mode of enquiry, rather than merely a form of recording the performance.

The Moving Canvas Project is a participatory research project with an adult community dance company where the dancers explore the act of drawing and moving simultaneously. The project offers new insights relating to the relationship between movement, drawing, textiles and choreography. This emergent knowledge is underpinned by theoretical frameworks, in drawing performance (Foà et, 2020), costume design (Barbieri, 2020), and movement improvisation (Buckwalter, 2010; Burrows, 2010; Doughty, 2019). The paper discusses a series of workshops where the process of creating textile design for costume and choreography for performance occurred concurrently. The authors present a balanced evaluation of the outcomes, sharing several observations regarding behaviour, performance, and overall aesthetic that emerged when dancers are asked to wear plain cream-coloured jumpsuits and draw on them whilst moving. It explores what influence the two disciplines had on each other and how dancers play with autonomy and collectivism as they draw on themselves and one another. The transient nature of movement creates a dissonance with the permanence of the drawing, which is left as a mark on the dancer’s disobedient bodies. It is within this dynamic interplay between movement and mark-making that a performance emerged.