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Parallax is the Trinity Laban staff and Creative Practice research student showcase series.

Here you will find a full list of past events.

PARALLAX

Find information on the most recent and forthcoming events – Parallax 12, 13 and 14 – here.

Parallax 11 –  Peregrinations

31 Jan 2018

Zoi Dimitriou and Prof. Jonathan Owen Clark present extracts on film from Zoi’s latest project Peregrinus, to be followed by a discussion around the research process.

The English term ‘pilgrim’ originally comes from the Latin word peregrinus, which means a foreigner, a stranger, someone on a journey, or a temporary resident. It can describe a traveller making a brief journey to a particular place or someone settling for a short or long period in a foreign land. Peregrinatio was the state of being or living abroad. 

Peregrinus is the latest site-specific performance/installation by artist and choreographer Zoi Dimitriou, which explores the act of walking, and of being ‘abroad’, for performer and audience alike.

What if the starting point for this journey is refusal? Walking defines a direction but the end point is never achieved. What if the contemporary invitation is not to leave your bed and walk but to pick up your bed and walk? In other words, to take with us in our mobility an anomalous stillness; and to walk alongside our supine, horizontal and impulsive selves. Each new step a fall or a stumble, caught up, recovering, in dance.


Parallax 10 – Sound and Movement

01 Dec 2017

Curated by Prof. Sam Hayden and Dr Dominic Murcott 

This showcase of new and recent works by current Trinity Laban staff and research students across the Faculties of Dance and Music includes live performances, installations, improvisations, multi-media projections and more. 

With The Trinity Laban Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Gregory Rose.

Free and open to the public, but tickets are required.


Parallax 09 – Exercise: Les Noces

Sun 29 Jan 2017

The Asylum, Caroline Garden’s Chapel, London SE15 2SQ
Elena Koukoli (Trinity Laban PhD candidate)

Elena Koukoli’s Exercise: Les Noces pushes the limits of performance by interweaving music, dance and visual art. The work translates Bronislava Nijinska’s iconic ballet Les Noces to an installation of ‘ready-made choreographies’: replicated and re-performed artworks, design objects and video clips. Throughout the three-hour event, the audience is invited to watch and listen, move around, come and go as they please or even attend a self-defence class. Exercise: Les Noces expands the conventional verges of dance performance, introducing a durational installation that challenges the frames of both theatre and gallery.


Parallax 08 – Difference and Repetition

2 Dec 2016

Curated by Dr Sam Hayden and Dr Dominic Murcott

A showcase of new and recent works by current Trinity Laban staff and research students across the Faculties of Dance and Music, including live performances, installations, improvisations, multi-media projections and more.

With The Trinity Laban Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Gregory Rose

Trinity Laban at Blackheath Halls

Difference and Repetition – after the title of GillesDeleuze’s famous thesis – will be the 8th in the Parallax series at Trinity Laban.

Deleuze’s idea of Difference understands the identity of any given thing as constituted on the basis of the ever-changing network of relations in which it is found. For Deleuze, identity is a secondary determination, while difference, or the constitutive relations that make up identities, is primary. This important and influential idea has multiple applications to the materials and concepts of art, whether sonic, movement or otherwise, and our composers, musicians, choreographers, dancers and other artists have been invited to respond.


Parallax 07 – Moving as a thought process: An insight into mindfulness through dance and choreography

12 Oct 2016

Dr Naomi Lefebvre Sell (Trinity Laban), Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa

This work draws on Naomi, Tara and Lucille’s understandings and expertise acquired through a collaboration which began in 2007, within the frame of Lefebvre Sell’s Doctoral research, investigating how mindfulness meditation impacts the dance making process. Over a nine-year period, they have let this original research filter and settle through our individual journeys as artists, teachers and researchers before recently carrying out a new research project funded by Arts Council England which focused on developing a practice towards a greater sense of mindful engagement and creativity, enabling and empowering artists and young people to draw on these principles. Their findings will be presented, also proposing novel methods in making and performing dance.

Chair and mentor of the project: Prof Sarah Whatley, Professor of Dance and Director: Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University

Free and open to the public. External visitors are requested to book their place in advance by emailing the Research Administrator, Angela Kerkhoff.


Parallax 06 – Contemporary interdisciplinary artistic practice

10 December 2015, Institute of Contemporary Arts

Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance presents an evening of new and recent work by current postgraduate students and staff, showcasing a diversity of contemporary interdisciplinary artistic practice, including composition and sonic arts, dance, visual arts and multi-media. The event will encompass multiple interpretations of the related concepts of spatiality and kinetics.

This project is the 6th in a series of performances whose theme renders the idea of the “parallax” – the separation of two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible – in artistic practice. 


Parallax 05 – Symposium on Musical Curating; Performances

6 February 2015, Institute of Contemporary Arts

The event at the ICA was curated by composer and Reader in Composition Sam Hayden in collaboration with the Trinity Laban Composition Department and the Trinity Laban Research Hub. The day featured a symposium on musical curating and a series of performances into the evening, with new and recent compositions by current Trinity Laban research students and staff.

This project was the 5th in this series of showcases whose theme renders the idea of the “parallax” – the separation of two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible – in musical form. We combined compositions in a single evening event with incommensurate aesthetic positions where no common ground is possible. Yet it is precisely via the dialectical tension of such work that new syntheses become possible.

15.00h – symposium examining the topic of the curation of contemporary music today. Open to Trinity Laban staff and students.

From18.00h – sound installation pieces, including fixed-media electroacoustic works and live electronic performance, running continuously in the café area outside the auditorium. 

19.30h – live evening performance

Trinity Laban Research Degree Programme students and staff composers were invited to submit pieces according to radically different traditions: either a Lachenmann-esque deconstruction of instruments or ensembles into timbre and noise, or a more ‘conventional’ harmonic approach in which the ensemble is treated as a more sonorous whole, following concepts often associated with minimalism or neo-classicism.

The evening consisted of a live evening concert in the ICA Theatre featuring performances of notated compositions for acoustic instruments performed by the Trinity Laban Contemporary Music Group. The live pieces included diverse combinations of improvisational, live-electronic, electroacoustic and theatrical approaches.


Parallax 04 – My Mother’s Tears

3 October 2014, Bonnie Bird Theatre, Trinity Laban 

Charles Linehan and Ballet Boyz

The piece mines Mike and Billy’s personal history of performing classical ballet mime from The Royal Ballet repertoire with unpredictable consequences. Individual phrases and gestures are presented with explanatory projected surtitles in a playful take on the lecture demonstration format.


Parallax 03 – Room & Road

12 and 13 September 2014, Laurie Grove Performance Laboratory, Trinity Laban

Mateja Bucar

Conceived and choreographed by Mateja Bucar, PhD candidate at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, this was both a performance and an installation suggesting and realizing the idea or, better, a recognition that space should not be perceived as something static, passive or inactive but as ‘equally alive, moving or active’ as the dancers themselves.

Mateja won Trinity Laban’s Lesley-Anne Sayers Research Award to develop her work Room & Road, a “duet of two spaces”. 

With grateful acknowledgment of support from the Cultural Department of the City of Ljubljana, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in London.

Find out more here: Room & Road


Parallax 02 – Body Material

18 – 19 September 2012 

Parallax 02, the second in the series of showcases curated by Research Degree Programme Creative Practice students, took place at Trinity Laban’s Faculty of Dance, Laban Building:

The visual art exhibition Body Material  featured work by RDP students Rachel Cherry, Jaimie Henthorn and Virginie Litzler.


Parallax 01

April 2011 

Here we saw the first in a new series of events showcasing the work of Research Degree Programme Creative Practice students:

Performances, installations and an open discussion.