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The Graduate School Showcase represents work from across the Masters programmes in the Faculty of Dance. Across two weeks from 19-30 October 2020, students share their final projects: the culmination of their Masters study.

The work is experimental and investigative in nature, drawing upon collaborative and interdisciplinary practices arising from choreographic and performance-making research.

This year due restrictions relating to COVID-19 the Showcase takes the form of performances with a limited capacity of socially-distanced audience, and in some cases online performances and livestreams. You can read more about each work in the programme notes below with links to social media channels and livestreams.

Each student has a limited amount of people allowed into their studio space, to watch and take part in. If there are any performances that you are interested in, you will need to contact the student of the particular work to check whether there is availability to attend. Please do not arrive to any of the scheduled performances unless you are on the approved list of names.

To find out more about Masters programmes at Trinity Laban please visit our website

Belinda Roy

MA Dance Performance

The Experience of Performing via Live-Streamed Technology

Date: Monday 19 October
Times: 14:30-15:15 & 16:30-17:15
Location: Studio 5 and 6

This research project explored the personal experiences of dancers and their modes of attention when performing to an audience via live-streamed screen-based technology. Due to social-distancing measures, live-streaming via video conferencing applications such as Zoom quickly became a ‘new normal’ for seeing and performing dance. Both participants engaged in a series of remote live-streamed performances and recorded their experience both during and after each performance.

This performance today will aim to represent the research undergone. The dancers will be in separate studios, communicating via live-streamed technology and will record their thoughts and feelings during the performance. As audience members you will be able to walk between the two studios to watch both dancers. After the fifteen-minute improvised performance, we will gather in Studio 5 for a short Lecture-Demonstration discussing the research findings.

 

Iole La Sala

MA Dance Performance

It’s just a trick

Date: Monday 19 October
Times: 16.00- 16.30 & 17.00-17.30
Location: External amphitheatre and Laban Theatre

The sense(s) of our memories:
The stories that one’s body want me to know and remember; are intended to be something that runs through not only my personal story, but the stories of others who have participated in it. It is a journey that begins from our motor patterns in relationship to the memories we have of them. I am referring to memories that have not only to do with the memory linked to the mind but also to our body, taken as a point of reference.

 

 

Iris Athanasiadi

MFA Choreography

Re: Sense – A multisensory experience for every – body

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Location: At home

“Re: Sense” is a multisensory experience that can be performed in any space, at any time, by any – body.
The piece aims to cultivate an alternative way of appreciating performative events by reawakening our palette of senses and utilizing it as a system of perception and interaction with our environment in a more meaningful and imaginative way.

You are invited to follow, resist, challenge the score in order to compose your own performative experience.

 

 

Suzannah Hall

MA Creative Practice

The Medusa Lens

Date: Tuesday 20 October
Time: 14:00-14:30
Location: Studio Theatre

A disassembly of the Myth of Medusa and objectification of the female body in performance.

 

Hristo Ushev

MFA Creative Practice

ANIMA

Date: Tuesday 20 October
Time: 17:30 – 18:00
Location: Studio Theatre

The short film “ANIMA” invites the viewer into a world, which is not conducted by the logic of the conscious mind. This world is settled with seeds that came from the unconscious and that are living their own mirage. The film follows a character into a landscape of dream-like scenes. These scenes form the interior of a psyche by only suggesting the endless extent of that psyche’s totality. “ANIMA” does not distribute a finalized story. Rather, it suggests a glimpse into an investigation of unconscious contents, aiming to awake and to inflame the imagination of the viewer.

The short film “ANIMA” participates in the Graduate Showcase as a part and a representative of the MFA research project Approaching and Expressing the Unconscious Contents via and in an Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice. Established as a Practice as Research, the MFA project was using some of the concepts of C. G. Jung as a foundation for the development of a perpetually emerging process, which was utilizing the amalgam of personal and collective unconscious contents in creative acts, executed in-between the disciplines of moving, drawing, writing, vocalizing and filming. Considering that the artistic creativity could be an entirely unconscious, symptomatic and symbolic process itself, the research delved into a deliberate interaction with the unknown psychic contents through solo and collaborative studio-based experiments with personal dreams, memories and imaginative activity. Using Jung’s method of Active Imagination as a main tool, all the creative stages of the research were following a pathway of rising self-knowledge and self-development for the ones experimenting. The short film “ANIMA”, as a part of the Graduate Showcase, presents an artistic piece based on Active Imagination and inspired by the solo and the collaborative stages of the research.

 

Amelia Zhou

MA Creative Practice

CHORA

Date: Wednesday 21 October
Times: 14:30– 15:00 & 16:00-16:30
Location: Studio Theatre

CHORA examines the transmission and translation of language through words, voice, movement and objects. Weaving through the echoes, resonances, juxtapositions and frictions between each of these mediums, CHORA questions and manipulates our inescapable need to build meaning via language. Words, voices and objects are negotiated between the realms of abstraction and representation, sound and sense, and narrative and symbolism. A swan becomes a quill, a mirror turns into a lake, and a letter is read out to the audience (or is it to the swan?) in scenes of transformation and plurality.

 

Greta Gauhe

MFA Choreography

Memories of Skin

Date: Wednesday 21 October
Times:15.30 – 16:30 and 18.00 – 19:00,
Location: Laban Theatre

“Touching our bodies, gesture toward each other and themselves each time challenging and perhaps deforming the body-politic, questioning the boundaries of what it means to touch and be touched to live together to live apart, to belong, to communicate, to exclude.” – E.Mannion

Memories of Skin is a performance about touch and connection. It explores how touch can be remembered and re-visited during a pandemic in the absence of the possibility of close physical contact and stems from a desire to touch and be touched. Four performers explore memory, empathy and imagination to recreate touch-like sensations, to remember the value of touch and to connect to one another, yet in an imagined way. Without ever leaving their seats, the audience members are called to inhabit the same imaginative space as the performers in an invitation to experience empathetic, imagined touch.
Once entering please remain seated on your allocated beanbag:

You will find crumpled balls of paper-

You can see them,
Touch them,
Feel them,
Hear them.

The room is full of subtle sounds, you produce some of these.

There are blank pieces of paper around you. Please reflect about some of the questions inside of the paper-balls on a new piece of paper next to you.
Please visit the interactive website for more information: https://www.gretagauhe.com/memories-of-skin-research

The work was made considering government guidelines to ensure everyone’s safety. The work includes audience participation but dancers will remain in distance at all times.

 

 

Ting-Ning Wen

MFA Choreography

C’est la vie (This is what it is)

Date: Thursday 22 October
Time: 12.00-13.30
Location: Conference room 1&2 & the Lightwell

This 90-minute durational performance invites the audience to enter and exit the space as they wish. It is encouraged to see the work from different viewpoints inside of the Laban building for various perspectives. Stemming from an engagement with everyday objects used in dining and movements during eating, scenes of repetition are explored in this work, allowing space for personal reflections about everyday life surrounding food.

 

 

Irene Fiordilino

PhD

Homing in on Home

Date: Thursday 22 October
Time: 12:30 – 13.00
Location: Laban Theatre

In Homing in on Home, two performers inhabit a surreal, “Escherian looking” room that serves as a container for linguistic clues and gravitational paradoxes.

The notion of space as a fixed system of coordinates is suspended, letting emerge the perspective-dependent relations amongst bodies and objects.

Foldable space is given a human dimension, fostering the development of recurring dramaturgical themes.

 

 

Yun Hsin Lin

MFA Creative Practice

Trace

Date: Friday 23 October
Time: 14.30-14.50
Location: Studio Theatre

This performance invites viewers to become more conscious of their own positions in space and time. We want audience members to try inviting every object to become a subject, measuring the distance between one’s self and other entities from a different perspective. Indeed, both individuals and objects are dancing in this same space together, each with its own life vibrancy.

 

 

Katherine Wilson

MA Creative Practice

Curves of Time & Interferometer

Date: Friday 23 October
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location: Laban Theatre

Addressing relational and durational elements inherent in the visual art genre of portraiture, this two-part installation explores embodied approaches to image and movement creation within improvised duet and portraits.

With a background, in visual art, Wilson distinguishes here between drawing and painting, investigating differences in the relating of each media to movement and performance arising in research.

 

Gaelin Little

MA Creative Practice

Turn

Date: Monday 26 October
Times:
14:00-14:20
14:30-14:50
15:00-15:20
15:30-15:50
16:00-16:20
16:30-16:50
Location: Seminar room A (six iterations every 20 mins)

Variation and transformation; change in relation to one’s surroundings, and/or a shift in the inner environment. A moving perspective. The smallest of turns assumes a unique axis, however momentary or temporary, creating a fluctuating center that adapts to shifting sensation and arrests perception. We find ourselves somewhere, somewhere else entirely.

 

Svenja Buehl

MFA Creative Practice

Gravitational Folding, in three frames

Location: Laban Theatre
Date: Monday 26 October
Time: 14:30-15:30

Witnessing my body
Negotiating shifts of bone, of tissue, of skin
Here I am
Letting go into gravity
A dance
The ground is coming up to meet me
A duet
Resting bones, resting tissue
A conversation
A sense of feeding back
Yielding
Being enveloped and gently held by the folding and unfolding of my skin.

 

Maja Luther

MA Creative Practice

body melts

Date: Tuesday 27 October
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
Location: Bonnie Bird Theatre

body melts is an exploration into the medium ice through a somatic approach. Investigating our internal experience and relationship to our body with and on ice. Pause. Listen. What do you sense when you feel the ice melting?

 

 

Thomas Withington

MA Dance Performance

Myths of the finished product.

Date: Wednesday 28 October
Time: 14:00-14:30
Location: Glass Meeting Room

Exploring through an autobiographical account my working process in re-languaging what is meant by embodiment in dance performance and movement research. This work represents the fluidity and adaptability of change in the process of discovering movement, bringing a new awareness and conversations to myself, which are continually shifting and are receptive to change.

 

 

Hui Chen

MFA Creative Practice

Vibrating From Within

Date: Wednesday 28 October
Times: 14:30-15:00 & 16:00-16:30
Location: Laban Studio 10

When you become conscious of an inner impulse, what/how do you feel? I feel vibrations travelling through my body.

This is an experiential exploration on vibration – the basic phenomenon underlying all beings, based on the practice of BMCSM (Body-Mind Centering®) and IBMT (Integrative Bodywork & Movement Therapy). It is a process of feeling, expressing and amplifying the inner vibration through mark-making, sounding, moving, stillness and silence. It is an ever-changing process in which I would like to invite you to witness, feel your own vibrations together with mine, and with the space.

*The space will be outlined in circles of “cells” and the participants will be invited to enter into one cell for this experience. There will be drawing materials in each cell, which will be sanitised beforehand, or can be used with the gloves provided.

 

Julia Gyulai

MFA Choreography

Landscape Beyond Death

Date: Wednesday 28 October
Times: 15.00-15.30 & 16.30 – 17.00
Location: Laban Theatre

Landscape Beyond Death is a piece created as the result of my practical and theoretical research in the past two years.

Keywords are…

• deconstructing narrative • the distorted self • postdramatic dance theatre • landscape dramaturgy • the distorted storyteller • creative subsystem • primary psychic processes •

Throughout my journey I experimented with projecting Freud’s primary psychic processes onto my choreographic practice. The process of dreaming – the archetype of creative activity became my main focus in exploring how fragments of traumatic experience may reach the surface and manifest into movement, structure and theatrical image.

 

 

Claire Godsmark

MA Creative Practice

A rose is a rose is a rose…

Date: Thursday 29 October
Time: 12:00-12:30
Location: Studio Theatre

“A rose is a rose is a rose” – Gertrude Stein

Things are what they are. Here, this title acts as a provocation as the inverse is also true.

Working from a starting point within the experientially based, non judgemental solo practice of Authentic Movement, I embark upon a reflexive solo examination of dancing as the relationship between dance and the dancer.

The resulting work is a contradictory integrating of this practice within a compositional frame. A hybrid perpetual.

 

Karen Ferry

MFA Dance Science

Date: Thursday 29 October
Time: 17:30-17:50
Location: Online

Tuesdae Houston

MFA Choreography

“Are you Jok(er)ing?” – Images of laughter

Date: Friday 30 October
Times: 14:00-14:20 & 16:00-16:20
Location: Studio Theatre

A performance of learnt elements, “Are you Jok(er)ing?” – Images of laughter is a display of research in practical form. Originally a movement dialogue between two people, the piece has grown into an autobiographical experience with laughter and what it reveals about its relationship with sound and movement. It attempts to create living images of laughter as meditation, punctuation, social cue, community, and a source of health and release in this pandemic. The works aims to deconstruct the audience-performer relationship and wrestles with the limitations of distanced togetherness to change how we experience performance art in our post-modern pandemic lifestyle.

“The best things are said when we don’t exchange words, we just exchange space” – Johnathan Graveor

This is not a presentation of laughter. This is an invitation to experience your personal encounter shaped by laughter.

 

Katie Burks

MFA Choreography

TOTAL FEAR

Date: Friday 30 October
Time: 19:00 – 19:20
Location: Laban Theatre

TOTAL FEAR is a dance-theatre production based on research of Total Theatre and the process of generating fear through dance and theatrical performance. Presented live in over 10 global locations through various capacities such as outdoor, socially distant cinema screenings, indoor watch parties, and theatrical venues, TOTAL FEAR seeks to use the constraints placed upon individuals by the pandemic in order to create an accessible, live horror production.

 

 

Franziska Boehm

MFA Creative Practice

getting  here : being here

Date: Thursday 16 July
Location: Online

The link below will bring you to a platform called padlet, that we will refer to as the manual.

This is the starting point for this event:  Manual for watching

Within the manual, you will find a direct link to an excerpt of the recorded live work,
getting  here : being  here

You need to have your headphones ready for this experience.

Once you start streaming your use of the manual is happening alongside the work. Do not get tangled up in this fact. It’s okay to circle back between the manual and the work.

either is okay

The links within the manual are in pink text.
The manual opens up onto a new tab every time, so nothing is lost.

It all remains.

Background to the work:

I see this online work, getting here : being here, as one iteration that emerged out of the practice and the research process of my MFA. The structure that was created was meant to share that arrival. It did not mean to feel like something finalised; in five minutes’ time, or tomorrow it would be different. With different people it would be different, because the process would have been different. I aimed to share this through the connection between the research and the live work sitting side-by-side. Looking forward, I am endlessly curious about how I could rediscover the form that I created for the online performance in a physical space.

We are very much looking forward to sharing a recording of our first online work with you!

Franzi, Serena, Paddy