Day 3 – The Start and End of the Body

INTERCHANGE FESTIVAL 2017

Day 3 – The Start and End of the Body

The final day of the festival brought artists and audience together to consider: ‘Where does the body start and where does it end? Do we need to have moving bodies in order to make dance? If dance is an embodied practice what are the edges, the conception, the decomposition of the body, of dance? Should we think of ourselves as singular bodies, as body corporate or as part of our environment?’

MORNING SESSIONS

Forum | Bodies and Spaces

Facilitator | Sam Spurr
Participants | Branch Nebula and Rochelle Haley

 What kinds of relationships do artists have with spaces? How do different environments, spaces and architectures – impress upon an artist’s creative work? What does an artist need from a space? How does an artist impact the spaces they inhabit at different points of the choreographic process?

Workshop | Verbal Limbs: Describing Your Dance

Facilitator | Sarah Houbolt

Sarah Houbolt took the philosophy from the non-sighted cultural community – her community – and played with this knowledge base to practically explore how we create, teach and present when eyes are not relevant and words and feeling sets the parameters.

AFTERNOON SESSIONS

Workshop | Osteogenuine – Alchemia Exteriores

Facilitator | Matt Shilcock

This workshop focused on our body’s relationship to space, time and environment using alchemic symbology and sacred geometry influences on the Osteogenuine methods. The workshop explored intention of movement, devising choreographic pathways derived from geometric patterns and symbology created from the dancers’ own statements of intent for self-transformation.

3 Sharing Activities

Workshop | Colour… Perception

Artist | Timothy Ohl 

During his Critical Path Illusions research residency with Alejandro Rolandi at UNSW, Timothy Ohl forged a new dialogue with Dr Juno Kim from the optical science and vision department. Based on experiments derived from optical illusions and the way the human brain interprets visual information, this workshop focused on distilling the process of illusion by demonstrating the many ways our perception can shift once we are immersed in a low light environment.

Workshop | Mapping Brain-Body Wanderings

Artist | Amaara Raheem

Amaara shared a ‘true’ story about friendship, war and death, and asked participants how their brains made sense of the tale. Where did they wander when listening to the story? Did they roam anywhere near ‘the start or the end of their body?’ Participants were invited to make maps of their brain-body wanderings, to collectively explore the role imagination plays particularly when considering the boundaries between wellness and illness.

Workshop | Extend

Artist | Monica Stevens

A dance workshop which examined, from an Aboriginal perspective, how the mind and spine collaborate.  The process investigated the crown, nape, thorax, girdles, centre and the base to probe the day’s inquiry into where the start and completion of the human body is in its movement.