Graduate School Showcase 2021

Jessie Jing Si Ng

MFA Choreography

The dog who ran down the road

Date: Mon 12 July
Time: 16:30-16:40 Installation
16:40-17:00 Performance
17:00-17:10 Installation

Location: Laban Theatre

‘The dog who ran down the road’ is a performative reconstruction of memory through employing the artistic methods of dance and poetry, in symbiosis, to create a transient, storytelling experience that does not necessarily provide resolutions for the viewer. Drawing from the choreographer’s grandmother’s single story from times of WWII about a dog who ran down the road, ‘The dog who ran down the road’ invites the audience to experience the original memory in, perhaps, the most poetic way imaginable: fragmented, layered, and liminal. The project ultimately does not question but surrenders to the inevitability of time and its passage, acknowledging the power of reimagination and errors of memory, and intensifies the importance of performance art and its encounters with people, and how it acts as a temporal vessel to deliver bygone stories.

 

Diane Didenko

MFA Creative Practice 

Resonance, reflection – a wave across the space

Date: Tuesday 13 July
Time: 18:00
Location: Laban Theatre

Resonance, reflection. A wave across the space. A vibration. All-pervasive always present imperceptible Consolation. Contemplation. Like the void around the star that’s been in the eye for too long, Humming a song. The performer is the composer is the mover. This transdisciplinary research thrives on an ambiguity where ‘both’ is also ‘neither’; sound and movement practices address and undo the idea of limit and distinction between disciplines, and therefore, in performance art. This places the creative self on an unspoken territory which demands to be listened to as much as it is being watched. In the darkness of intuition, that is shifting grounds, blurry lines, diffuse sounds, elusive traces, and the suggestion of an ‘in-between’ that flickers and reverses.

 

Chloe Bowman

MFA Choreography

Memories of the ones who mothered us

Date: Wednesday 14 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Studio Theatre

‘Memories of the ones who mothered us’ is an intergenerational collaboration that explores relational autobiography, memory, and the absence of presence. Through a collection of letters that my grandmother wrote to her sister that were left after her death, my mother and I have engaged in a virtual collaboration over the past year. We have questioned the ways in which we have been mothered and or have mothered, the complexities of such and the infinite ways to define mothering. Through the use of voice, movement, and text we have created a multilayered performance that questions our relationships and interconnectedness.

 

Tara Simmonds

MFA Choreography

Sound Switch

Date: Wednesday 14 July
Time: 16:00
Location: Laban Theatre

A sonic installation performance exploring the relationship between the aural and the visual, in which sonic and audio-visual effects are the motivators behind the choreography. Sound Switch dissociates and reassociates the tie between familiar sound and image, through manipulating an individual’s expectation in the relationship between the two. By way of live and digital means, the work aims to incite a shift towards the sonic within the visual process; highlighting sounds often not given a second thought, and layered through one’s experience, memory and imagination in the act of listening. Is seeing always believing?

The intention behind the work is not to use sound as a medium to elicit specific memoirs, but to engage those who perceive the work, in a noticing of their sensory conception of sound and image, which has cultivated as a result of their subjective culture, history and memory.

 

Pavlina Kratochvilova

MA Creative Practice

Draculess

Date: Thursday 15 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Laban Theatre

In this live performance installation, the audience will be able to place the focus on the other side of the story of the well-known gothic novel Dracula.

With a background in acting, Pavlina focuses on a devising creation of drama and physical movement, using some horror elements and exploring the feministic point of view through the ‘New Woman’ victorian era all the way to today’s world and the notion of how Mina would feel if it were all to happen again, now.

 

Alice Gale-Feeny

MFA Creative Practice 

Begin in the Middle (Neither Me, nor the Bucket)

Date: Friday 16 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studios Performance Lab 1

‘Begin in The Middle (Neither Me, Nor The Bucket)’ is a performance practice, that proposes ways in which we may become-with each other, using a series of physical ‘containers’ in body-object arrangements, as well as voice and video, to create feedback loops that inform intra-acting solos and group meetings.

Through a process of recursion, we recalibrate from the middle, working with emerging vocabularies and arrangements as new starting points. What becomes of ‘us’?

The work is performed alongside Manuela Albrecht, Svenja Buehl and Michaela Gerussi, and texts within the work are co-written with these collaborators.

Alice Gale-Feeny trained in Fine Art working and works with performance, via dance, writing, video and facilitation. She is interested in the relationship between felt experience and conceptual ideas and fictions. Drawing from perspectives within feminist science, posthumanism, physics and somatic practices, her work considers how perceptions and boundaries between bodies and spaces are differently understood.

 

Stephanie Woodland

MFA Creative Practice 

In The Space Of: A choreographic work exploring the arrival to the spaces in between through rhythm, resonance and movement.

Date: Friday 16 July
Time: 16:30
Location: Studio Theatre

From her own experiences, “In The Space Of:” explores what resonates and the arrival to this unknown space through text, rhythm, experimental sound and whole-body African aesthetic and somatic movement practices. This work is embedded in the lived experience and story of the “what is and what happens”.

 

Tara Brenner

MFA Creative Practice 

Make Way for Me

Date: Friday 16 July
Time: 17:30
Location: Laban Theatre

What is your place in this world as a learner?

“I am here–no I’m not I have the answer–to a question you didn’t ask Your words are my boat, and now I’m sailing down a river of endless options. The river is full of fish, and I don’t catch one with a rod, instead I cast a net and pull in as much as I can fit on the boat. I manage to keep going so long as the boat doesn’t sink.”

Make Way for Me is a performance work that represents neurodiversity and its effects on dance artists like myself. As someone diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I would like others to understand how my learning difficulty defines my approach to creative practices. I invite the audience to observe my behaviour as I make a very private part of my life public. You will join me as I enter a trance, finding yourself distracted by my performative simulation of how my mind works. Have your smartphone out, WiFi connected, camera open, and prepare to scan a QR code–come and have a glimpse into my life.

 

Robbie Bird

MFA Choreography

Date: Monday 19 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Laban Theatre

Francesca Matthys

MA Creative Practice

Something like that…

Date: Tuesday 20 July
Time: 14:00-15:00 Installation
15:00-15:20 Performance
Location: Studio Theatre

Something like that…grasps at the sometimes tangible, sometimes intangible threads that piece together identity and it’s link to the past. Through an interdisciplinary performance approach and installation, the work and process explores the performer’s identity as an experience of dissolved yet diverse cultural heritage. Through physical storytelling and text, it is a journey of the South African; Coloured; Female identifying body, navigating the misinterpretation of identity and self identification in new space; London, while intuitively acknowledging the ancestral history/lineage that has come before.

Something like that…as an offering is a process in mapping, locating, tracing and potentially puzzling together something new yet still…Something like that.

 

Daniela Delerci

MFA Choreography

Meaning of Spaces

Date: Tuesday 20 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studios Performance Labs 1+2

“Meaning of spaces” is an exploration of the confronting nature of the visual and acoustic potentiality of the spatial dimension designed through two sensorial installations. The project unpacks the multi-dimensionality of spaces, challenging the dialogue between the body, the senses and its design during the experience. Space is designed “as an experience of sensation and the perception” (White, 2013, p. 12) that bridge the intimacy of the subjectivity within the external experience, criticizing the “separation of the self from the world, subject from object, and in the context of dance, of the spectator from the performer” (Libeskind, 2012, p. 73).

The work guides the audience through two distinctive spatial experiences:

The whitespace investigates the visual dimension of the spatiality as a metrical organisation of lines and as a composition of elements constantly fixed such as “vertical and horizontal patterns embodied” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 445).

The blackspace explores the aural dimension through a process of sonic spatialisation, questioning sounds as a stimulation for localisation, distances, directions and movement in the space through multiple views of perspective.

 

Julia Pond

MFA Creative Practice

BRED

Date: Tuesday 20 July
Time: 10:00 – 18:00
Location: Seminar Room A

BRED’s open plan offices (some might call them a participatory installation) use materials bread dough, powerpoint and the body, shifting temporalities and blurring language with lingo. The offices are open over an 8-hour working day, offering a few different opportunities for you to experience the brand, build your capacity to wait-with, and gain insight into what really makes a great manager. There are 4 arrival possible arrival times over the course of the day. Please book the one that suits you best. You will spend between 40 minutes and 1 hour with us.

Please register via this link.

 

Marie Chabert

MA Creative Practice

Striking chords

Date: Wednesday 21 July
Time: 13:00
Location: Studio Theatre

Striking chords intends to weave the fabric between the poetic, the somatic and the performative by exploring the physiological properties of the connective tissues and what Dr Stephen M Levin calls ‘the new biomechanics’. 

This group research focuses on fascial awareness and biotensegrity in dance via touch and non-touch practices inspired by Contact Improvisation and experiential anatomy. In particular, we attend to the body and inter-bodies’ relationships as living architectures following the laws of tensegrity structures, such as seeing the body and the composition of bodies in space as compression elements floating in continuous tension.

 As well as re-creating a fascial matrix amongst the dancers, we develop a non-touch practice experiencing the eyes as a fascial organ, a voluminous mass, a skin organ that can act as an interface between our ‘innersphere’ (Joanne Avison) and our ‘kinesphere’.

 By pursuing this research I propose to use the tensegrity system as a model to apprehend the relational realm and to shift the relationships’ dynamic within a group. Through redefining our understanding of biomechanics as a holistic interdependent system able to adapt and differentiate depending on its use, we redefine and question our position in the world, our roles and identities amongst a group of individuals.

 A more comprehensive description of the research and documentation is available on mariechabert.com/research

 

Laura Colomban

MFA Creative Practice 

MÖBIUS DEVICES – A Performance Sound Installation Process

Date: Wednesday 21 July
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
16:00-16:20

Location: Laurie Grove Studios Performance Labs 1+2

“I like to hear the sound of form, and I like to hear the sound of it breaking.” (Solomon, 2014, p.84)

Möbius Devices is a Performance Sound Installation Process which travels through space and time, questioning the interaction between voice, circular processes, intimacy, and technology. Through this experiment we look at how the overload of information can be a potential space of connection.

The audience will be asked to scan a QR Code at the entrance of the building and connect with their phones and headphones to aurally navigate the space. It is a physical exploration of the uncanny presence of the absence, suspended in a circular, spherical time, with no end and no begging.
The audience will be invited to contemplate the stimulation of visual, kinaesthetic, cognitive, and sonic perception.

Each particle that is within you is in touch with all that is.

Registration

 

Franziska Boehm

Research Degree Programme 

Date: Wednesday 21 July
Time: 16:30
Location: Laban Theatre

Irene Fiordilino

Research Degree Programme 

Invisible Cities

Date: Wed 21 July
Time: 18:00
Location: Laban Theatre

‘Invisible cities’ – inspired by Calvino’s homonym book – is an interdisciplinary performance which blends choreography with live drawing in an immersive experience. The performance unfolds as a journey through the imaginary cities described in Calvino’s book, a tangle of colours, textures, objects and affects which form surreal and dreamlike architectures. Memory and archive coexist in the two performers’ body, the one element of tangible continuity within a journey which leaves only ephemeral traces.

An overhead projector dominates the performative space, acting as a portal between two realms: the physical and the imaginary, enhancing a surreal sense of spatiotemporal suspension.

The live-drawn maps stand for tangible archival residuals of the past, a real-time translation of the present, and a potential guideline to embody and interpret the future. Which unmapped territories lay in the gap between memory and archive?

 

Hoi Wan Lau

MA Creative Practice

Kinetic Taste

Date: Wednesday 21 July
Time: 18:30
Location: Studio 10

Kinetic taste intends to bridge the gap between the often strong and visceral emotions, memories and thoughts evoked when we eat or drink certain flavours of foods, and the emotions we channel when expressing ourselves through sound and movement. Whether it be ecstasy or nostalgia, the feelings induced through gustatory or olfactory stimulation can be vivid and intense, and kinetic taste works to bridge the gap between the typically disassociated areas of taste, smell, sound and movement. By doing so, this performance aims to illuminate the complex and personal emotions we take for granted when we eat or drink.

Focusing on the more profound side of consumption is something everybody can do. In an era where many of us have the opportunities to consume a wide variety of cuisines, exploring this connection can provide a more fulfilling experience, as well as one which pays greater appreciation to how fortunate we are to live in this period of time.

 

Michaela Gerussi

MFA Creative Practice 

The daily material: Echoes I have been making

Date: Thursday 22 July
Time: 13:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studios Performance Lab 1

This performance/installation functions as a window into my research inquiry which hinges at the intersection of improvised movement practice, affect, the nervous system and self-regulation. The window represents one moment within an ongoing, multi-modal practice and reflects a process-oriented approach to dance-making. Iterative in nature, the practice is considers notions of maintenance and ‘daily material’ from the perspectives of both human physiology and artistic practice. It situates the feeling-dancing body in the context of its history, anatomy, physiology, past, present and future, including the multi-layered experience of the performer as a material for dance-making.

 

Noa Iluz

MA Creative Practice

Date: Thursday 22 July
Time: 14:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studio 6

Emma Lindsay

MFA Creative Practice 

one in a trillion is all is everything is one

Date: Thursday 22 July
Time: 14.00-17.45 Laurie Grove Studios Performance Lab 2 and 16:00-18:00 Greenwich Park

How might a reconnection to the natural world, through embodied movement, cultivate a positive sense autonomy within the climate-change discourse? How might these new existential harmonies manifest? Is there potential for greater agency, ecological empathy and collective hopefulness? This is what this project seeks to explore.

‘one in a trillion is all is everything is one’ combines the influence of somatic movement practitioners, visual artists, meditation and mindfulness techniques to form a methodology which allows for phenomenological dialogues with a changing biosphere. With an emphasis on how varying environments might invite particular bodily responses, this project investigates how somatic methodologies not only allow the individual to sit with ecological grief, but can provide a space that values individual subjective experience as highly as climate data. Within a collaborative group framework, we have been exploring the potential of Body-Mind Centring, Focusing, embodied writing and site-sensitive movement scores to ground the individual in the midst’s of an interconnected environment and open up an dialogic response, as opposed to a didactic or disembodied comment. With reference to the ecological disaster, philosopher Timothy Morton proclaims, ‘I’ve had enough of being slapped by these numbers, we need to start living it.’ (Morton, 2019, p.21).

Come and join us in Greenwich Park as we live it. You may wish to simply witness, or there is the option to listen to and try out some simple scores created by our research group. If you wish to join in, please bring a phone and a set of earphones. For an immersive insight into the creative research and to view drawings, film, photographs and writing created during the process, head to Performance Lab 2 at the Laurie Grove building in New Cross.

To access the scores in your own time visit: https://emmalindsay5558.wixsite.com/embodiedecologies

 

Aparajita Burjwal

MA Creative Practice

JHAMA

Date: Friday 23 July
Time: 14:30
Location: Studio Theatre

JHAMA is anything that dazzles. Indian dance reality shows are meant to dazzle. Thus, everything must be jhama. That jhama quotient of everything needs to be high: emotion, costumes, sound, set design, conversations and choreography. A typical episode of a dance reality show is like a condensed bollywood film on steroids. Through this short film, I aim to encapsulate one episode of a dance reality show in all its glory.

 

Sandra Barefoot

MA Creative Practice

Being Woman

Date: Friday 23 July
Time: 15:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studios Performance Lab 1

Do you know of the stories of women who sit in prisons?

Where walls crush their screams
no tears can arrive,
the scorching of fire
burns their insides.

And fear speaks.

Do not say a word

If you read just one story that’s slipped under your chair quietly
asking you to dare to open it.

An intimate solo performance exploring the echoes and resonance of shame and resilience arising from interviews of women’s lived experience of prison.

As this performance contains strong material if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me at: barefootsandra2@gmail.com.

 

Adianna Apodaca

MFA Creative Practice 

Tree, Rock, Water Bodies

Date: Friday 23 July
Time: 15:30 – 18:00
Location: Laurie Grove Studio 5+6

Tree, Rock, Water Bodies is a three-part audio-visual installation exploring the relationship between digital technologies and bodies in the natural landscape. The viewer is invited on a journey of digitally mediated moments in process; a search for imaginative transformation arising from within the moving body.

This research is a personal investigation into the potentialities of the imagination and what it might reveal, offer, and teach as an intentional mode of consciousness. Tree, Rock, Water Bodies is an experimental collaboration between many bodies, my own, tree, camera, rock, computer, water, projector—an ecology of telescopic eyeballs, mega-pixel blobs, and wave creatures. Within my digital and movement making practice, my aim for this work is to draw out embodied knowledge which is generally assumed to be negated by our digitally centered world. Sometimes elusive, sometimes apparent, this relational creating and re-creating blurs the lines between the digital and the biological—between the known and the unknown.