Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior
to the event but here is just a sample of what will
be delivered and discussed.
Day 1 - 11th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Professor Victor Merriman: We Are Where We Are’: Dancing A Fractured World
‘We Are Where We Are’ considers how performers might navigate the present as a crisis of ideas and values. How might dance practices and performers make questions of power, class, gender and race central to better futures? How might artists project humane imaginaries beyond, not where ‘we’ are, but where ‘we’ have been positioned?
Dance and Resistance
Victoria Hunter: Site Dance and Urban Resistance
Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Kratzwald 2015, Whybrow 2010), urban performativity (Makeham 2005, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980) and urban design (Childs 2004, Carter 2015) the presentation explores urban parks and squares as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, narratives, function and regulatory conditions. It questions; what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces, what do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual
make up and what (whose?) purpose might this work serve?
Susanne Foellmer: Movement Forbidden: Using Choreography
as a Means of Protest in Times of Curfew
The interweaving of dance and protest is a common phenomenon in recent social movements such as the regular flash mob One Billion Rising. Generally, bodies gathering in the public sphere are crucial in the struggle for social and political justice. But what happens if the physical public sphere is not available, as induced by the ongoing pandemic? How does protest change, and how can dance and choreography support the ongoing need for making one’s voice heard?
Performative Lecture
Michael Douglas Kollektiv and Dana Caspersen: Polarity Party
Participants are invited to consider the questions: What is polarization? What does it do in us? What do we do with it? The Polarity Party offers a situation where we can focus on the mechanism of polarization itself and our role in – this will be an experiment in delivering this event online as it is usually presented live.
Film : Circadian Rosemary Lee Circadian (2020)
A short dance film by Rosemary Lee and Roswitha Chesher. From one afternoon to the next over the summer solstice weekend 2019, one of 24 dancers, ranging in age from 10-70+ years, performed a short solo on the
hour every hour.
Dance and Identity
Professor Thomas F Defrantz - Black thought in motion
How are artists crafting unusual approaches to digital presence and formations of dance pedagogy and sharing? An offering of means and methods to encourage participation in digital offerings of thinking together towards movement that will be made in physical distancing.
Sharon Watson DL - Displaced positivity and the power of voice
When do we seize an opportunity and where do we enable the power of our lived experiences to drive change? How do we add power and impact to our voice? How can we ensure the messenger is the one
embraced and not just the message? This needs to change.
Workshop
Michelle Man – Dance Objects (DO): Tea Towel Dances workshop
The Tea Towel Dances workshop builds on the recent experiences of teaching online from my kitchen during lockdown. Tea Towel Dances emerged from the necessity to activate and communicate sensitized and affective touch as an embodied and creative experience across a screen. For ODD2, this workshop invites an exploration into the reciprocity between the tea towel and moving participant, with the aim to unfold personal narratives
and a space to question encounters with interculturalism across digital boundaries.
Please bring a tea towel to this session.
Dance and Identity
Thea Stanton: Immersion: Negotiating Boundaries, Difference and Democracy
This paper asks whether the creation of an immersive experience through a choreographic embodied lens
could help address these concerns. Acknowledging the pioneering works of companies such as the Judson Church Group who’s participatory performances were at the forefront of ‘the threefold agenda of ‘activation, authorship, community’ (Kolb, 2013), the presentation explores the use of movement practices that embrace a decentralization of decision-making and nurture an inter-subjective awareness in order to develop an immersive practice that embraces an ethic of respect and care.
Rosa Cisneros: Artists as critical workers
This paper responds to the notion of artists as critical workers and explores the manner which the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project is exploring questions around boundaries, borders, exclusion and buried histories. DBiC brought forward “lesser known” independent dance artists and voices that are hidden, such as Refugee and Migrants and the Roma from Romania.
Film: Unseen Designs, Bisakha Sarker
The film reflects in dance, spoken word, music and image on current scientific thought and hopes
to evoke greater curiosity amongst the general public on the mysteries of the world around us.
Key note
Dr. Elena Marchevska: There Are Other Worlds *
In this talk I will reflect on my most recent practice as research collaborative projects ‘Finding home’ (2018-2020) and ‘Third nature’(2020). I will look into how ways of studying and representing migrants can have world-making effects. How do we talk about the meaning of care from our own migrant marginalized experience of everyday caring? In this projects, we collaboratively think of different worlds. Worlds where it not enough to detect what is there, what is given in the things we study and experience about migration, but also worlds where we think about what is not included and about what migrant could become. Worlds that are constantly rethought, contested
and enriched.
Closing Act
Raconteur 1
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day
Film: Kontrol, Patricia Carolin Mai
KONTROL is a solo performance by and with Patricia Carolin Mai, and the epilogue to the trilogy
“bodies in states of emergency”. KONTROL is an intense experiment on competing with your own body.
* Inspiration drawn from Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Our Dance Democracy 2:
Presenters Abstracts
Full abstracts will be available to all delegates prior to the event but here is just a sample of what will be delivered and discussed.
Day two 12th February 2021
Opening Keynote
Film: RED, Liz Lea
Image Credit: Lorna Sim
RED is fearless, RED is fierce, RED is powerful – a one woman show full of film and fabulousness. RED explores Liz Lea’s journey and experiences with Endometriosis. She has been living with the disease for 20 years while creating and touring her work internationally. This is a film from the performance in lockdown, performed in an empty theatre.
Creative team:
Choreographers: Vicki van Hout, Virginia Ferris, Martin del Amo
Dramaturg / Mentor: Brian Lucas
Composer of original score: Alexander Hunter
Cinematographer: Nino Tamburri
Film Editor: Arianna Bosi
Script writers: Liz Lea, Brian Lucas, Victoria Lea
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris
Rehearsal Director and Dramaturgy: Natalie Ayton
Technical Manager: Craig Dear
Costumes design: Liz Lea, Brian Lucas, Bruce Scott and Brooke Giles
Costume Consultant: Cate Clelland
Publicity Designer: Andrea McCuaig
Publicist: Emma Dykes
Keynote
Alexandrina Hemsley: Retrieving Inner Dances: Making A Way Back To Intimacy
The world is burning up and we are burning out.
I will draw on autobiographical experiences of vanishings, disembodiment, a loss of (spiritual) voice, mental health and injury and map how the racist, sexist and abelist environments of contemporary dance reinforce a sense of lacking.
Democratising spaces requires us to sit with complexity and multiple perspectives with compassion and empathy. In the environment, words and texture I will work towards in this talk.
Dance in Pandemic
In conversation:
The Body and Pandemic, Liz Lea, Tammi Gissell and Hanna Cormick
Drawing on 70 years of combined arts practice working across Australia and the world these leading artists discuss how boundaries and displacement have impacted their lives and practice. The talk will draw on lived experience of disability, chronic illness, displacement giving rise to creativity.
Process and Reflection
Patricia Carolin Mai - KONTROL
KONTROL is for all people who are enthusiastic about dance, performance, visual arts and extreme Sports and who deal with gender justice and the right to free self-determination. The short lecture will reflect about my process and work about KONTROL with photos and explanations. The video shows my process of androgynisation.
Yinka Graves - The Disappearing Act
The Disappearing Act is a solo exploration of the ways in which Black women articulate their resistances to negation. Yinka is particularly interested in methods of camouflage and mimicry that insidiously seep into the intimate realm. Asking what the real cost of being viable is in a system that has only ever seeked to exploit or at best commodify you.
melissandre varin- Practice of resistance process of mothering
*This presentation is to be experienced with a bowl of flour nearby.*
This paper explores how a home-based autoethnographic multifaceted performance with one’s child exceeds dominant White European notions of working from home and staying at home in times of global pandemic. To plant the seeds of this argument i will be articulating words and sharing an audio-visual assemblage: of flour and Earth 1/3, a performance with and for Eole (15mo), camera and all of us.
of flour and Earth 1/3 interrogates white maintenance arts in relation to unregulated and fluid Black intimacy and parenting. In this provokation i share personal testimonies, and express from a place of transitional gratitude supported by the work of Alice Walker, bell hooks, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Saidiya Hartman. Extending gratitude to frame and reframe improvised everyday performances with Eole as i queer parent them.
i argue that actively looking for ways to hold difficult intergenerational conversations at home and beyond is essential work right now. With this account of home working with a baby, i am attempting to shift, re-member, and redirect artistic and academic activism to my immediate communities as an expansive and healing gesture towards archiving and imagining beyond white scripts.
Keynote
Dylan Quinn: Evolution or Revolution
We have a choice to make. To enact the change our society requires or to wait until the situation becomes so unbearable for so many we are forced to act.
The “normal” that we wish to return too, as a result of the abnormal context of 2020 was not a normal that was acceptable to everyone… or indeed the majority. The voices of those unheard for too long may have got louder over the last few years however the change that is required is moving too slowly for a world that is changing rapidly. We must understand the various change maker roles we can hold and how we can be at the forefront of holding decision makers to account. Returning to the “normal” off before is tantamount to returning to straighten the deck chairs on the titanic just as the iceberg hits. #Fnormal
Community and Networks
Dr Laura Griffiths & Emily Snow : Communities of Dance Practice within the city of Leeds: How the work of Leeds Dance Partnership reimagines modes of city-wide dance activities and infrastructure.
This presentation considers the ways in which the work of Leeds Dance Partnership ( LDP) illustrates new models of working between artists and institutions within the context of the city. Leeds Dance Partnership is a consortium of six Leeds dance organisations, funded by ACE (Ambition for Excellence) with a central purpose to grow and develop dance in Leeds and the wider North. This is achieved through the delivery of a range of initiatives, projects and commissions which have seen new modes of collaboration emerge within the city.
Sarah Shead: Building a democratic community in an era of ‘chumocracy’.
A workforce built on chumocracy. The defining feature of a chumocracy is that those in positions of power and influence give jobs or opportunities to others like themselves, often their friends or know one another socially. A further defining feature is that those in the best position to change the system are often unable to see the problem and are most likely to think they got there simply through talent and hard work.
So, in a time when chumocracy is on the rise, when our leaders seem to be disconnected from the very problems they are trying to fix, where can we look for inspiration? The Golden Age Pirates!
Dance in Pandemic
Shelley Owen and Josh Slater: Making Space for Action and Thought
This collaborative performance paper is an examination into knowledge sharing between self-organising independent dance artists at a time of precarity. Drawing upon an ongoing collaboration between Shelley Owen and Josh Slater, it reflects on the project as a method to unpick and explore the wider notions of action through collective endeavour. Responding to a lack of training pathways for professional artists, Owen and Slater devised a series of encounters within the North West and South West of England in which independent dance artists and choreographers could access a focused environment for training and development.
Workshop/Seminar :
Dancing Communities
Rosemary Kostic Cisneros, Charlie Ingram and Karen Wood:
Ethics and Equity in Dance and Theatre Practice Research
The necessity to engage in a dialogue around the issues of Ethics and Equity in Dance and Theatre have been identified in the field of artistic practice and in the academic sector of Practice Research (PR). This workshop/seminar is directed to postgraduate researchers (PGRs), artists and early career researchers (ECRs).
Dance and Identity
Patricia Noxolo In/security in relation to Jamaican dancehall.
Drawing on her experience with the CARISCC network, rather than as a dancehall practitioner or researcher, Dr Noxolo offers a critical review of the work of some of the key theorists of Jamaican dancehall – Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Carolyn Cooper, Donna Hope and Julian Henriques.
Lesley Pruitt, and Erica Rose Jeffrey:
Front and Centre - Embodied Youth Voices
The past 18 months have seen a dramatic increase in the visibility of dance as implicated in politics and peacebuilding. Across a range of issues, politicians, healthcare workers and protestors are using dance as a means of expression and an embodied voice. In this swell of performativity, young people are front and centre, active in their use of dance connected to social change and including key examples of young women stepping into leadership roles. We will examine youth leadership and local and global connections as seen in the light of recent political activations of dance and building on our previous research on dance, young people and peacebuilding.
Dance in Pandemic
Connor Elliman: Making Dances in a Pandemic
This paper discusses the process of making a solo work - exploring body and space - which was performed in an online platform Latitude. Further contemplating the choreographic aesthetics of dancing at home, and the effects of COVID-19 on an independent artists life.
Dr. Sarah Black-Frizell: Domestic Spaces, arts making during a pandemic
Domestic Spaces is a panel of national and international artists and scholars chaired by Dr Sarah Black-Frizell. This panel offers perspectives and exchange on the ways artists and academics have adapted and developed their existing arts making practice and research methodologies during Covid-19 and ensuing Global Lockdowns. The panel members are contributing to a larger project – Domestic Spaces which will become a series of edited interviews.
Dance and Feminism
Josephine Leask : In pursuit of liberation - New Dance Magazine,
Spare Rib and the embodiment of second wave feminism.
In this paper I acknowledge the influence of feminist print culture on New Dance Magazine’s development of second wave thinking. I question how both embodied the personal is political and nurtured spaces for non-hierarchical writing modes in a comparative study with Spare Rib, engaging with close reading and thematic analysis to identify points of over-lap as well as disconnect between the two magazines. Exploring a selection of articles, reviews and letters of correspondence from the early phases of each magazine, 1975 – 1983, I argue how SR’s affective writing and personal testimony nurtured solidarity with women while NDM’s writing from the body added dance to conversations about feminism.
Sarah Houston: #PoleFitnessOver40AndProud:
the slippery morality of pole work
Performative Conversation. Pole dance has had a murky history as an “exotic” form. Female, nearly naked bodies gyrating around poles have been a popular part of the sex industry since the 1950s. Yet it evolves from a longer tradition of the circus and is now taken on by the leisure industry as a form of fitness.
Our performative conversation plays around with the fixed notions of pole’s exotic and morally blanched inheritance as well as engaging in the materiality of the pole itself as a point of contact between two entities. We discuss whether these experiences can make slippery the rigid conceptualisations of the form and question how the practice might emancipate the older woman from a desexualised status or ‘effortless’ sexuality. In beginning this conversation, we aim to highlight hidden dancers and a marginalised form.
Closing Act
Raconteur 2
Wendy Houstoun rounds up the highlights of the day.