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)
OPENING SPEAKER
Victor Merriman: Professor of Critical Performance Studies, Edge Hill University
Victor Merriman is Professor of Critical Studies in Drama at Edge Hill University. He is Director of the Performance and Civic Futures Research Group (2013-), and a founder director of One Hour Theatre Company (2016-). He publishes on Irish theatre, postcolonial criticism, public policy, pedagogy, and cultural theory. He has published two monographs, Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (Carysfort Press, 2011), and Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He has edited special issues of the on-line journal Kritika Kultura (http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk; Issues 14; 15 (2010); 21/22 (2013), and co-edited ‘Cultural Responses to Crises in Urban Democracy’ (30: 2018)). He was appointed a member of An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council of Ireland, by Michael D Higgins, now in his second term as President of Ireland. In that capacity, Professor Merriman chaired the Review of Theatre in Ireland (1995-6). He is a member of the international advisory boards of Unitas, Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, and the British Association for Irish Studies. He has credits as a performer, director and dramaturg, including David Lloyd’s The Press, performed at the University of Ateneo de Manila, in July 2009.
Elena Marchevska: Dr. and Senior lecturer in Drama and Performance,
London South Bank University
A practitioner, academic and researcher interested in creating work that can help us to think through
new historical discontinuities that have emerged in post-capitalist and post-socialist transition. This is
ever more relevant at a time when the Eurozone is fragmenting, and right wing populisms are on the rise.
In addition, A researcher, she writes extensively on the issues of belonging, female body and the border and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic work explores borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. Ultimately, she is interested in creating and researching work that provides means by which people can meet, human to human, in all their differences, in the most sensitive and sincere way possible.
Alexandrina Hemsley: Choreographer, dancer, writer and facilitator
Alexandrina has recently founded her own organisation Yewande 103. Yewande 103 formalises the past 10+ years of Creative Director Alexandrina Hemsley’s work in the contemporary dance field as a choreographer, performer, writer, mentor and educator.
Alexandrina Hemsley’s practice is shaped by the morphing disciplines of dance, dance for camera, live art, theatre, mentoring, creative and critical writing. Driven by an interest in fracturing, connectivity, displacement & emotionality, they hope to find and share ways of expressing felt, lived realities. They work with intricate improvisation scores and vivid performance environments which insist on conjuring embodied enquiries into a multiplicity of voices. This includes work within organisations around anti-racism, anti-ableism and embodied advocacy. It is a life-long, nuanced undertaking. Alexandrina is Associate Artist at Cambridge Junction, Board Member of Chisenhale Dance Space and International Associate Artist 2020/21 at
Dance Ireland.
Dylan Quinn: Artistic Director, Dylan Quinn Dance Theatre
Dylan Quinn and has been working as a Choreographer, Dance Artist, performer and facilitator for over 26 years. In 2009 he established Dylan Quinn Dance Theatre (DQDT) and has operated as Artistic Director for the last 11 years. Dylan has created numerous company performances and commissioned works for a range of dance and theatre companies and was Irish Times Theatre Award Nominee 2018. Dylan’s work has been presented nationally and internationally across Europe and the US.
Dylan has performed and undertaken a wide range of community and education projects across the UK, Ireland and Internationally. He has development a particular focus on creating work that explores the
context around the border in Ireland, i’s impact and highlighting the experiences of these living in border communities. He has undertaken a range on innovation projects involving performances on the border in
live and film formats.
Dylan has been instrumental in initiating the We Deserve Better social engagement movement in Northern Ireland, highlighting the inadequacies of the political system. As a development of the movement he has established the Conversations NI platform, engaging people from a range of backgrounds in conversations that are important to them and to their community.