Cinematic Experiments

DIGITAL INTERCHANGE FESTIVAL 2019-20

Margie Medlin and Nikki Heywood in Discussion: Cinematic Experiments

Artists Margie Medlin and Nikki Heywood look at some of the experiments from Margie’s Cinematic Experiments project (2017-2019) and discuss the concepts and ideas behind them.

The Cinematic Experiments project (2017-2019) created a series of twenty-seven experiments that are available on Vimeo (see links to the experiments and conversation below). The experiments bring together newly created choreography with media practices. As a series, they explore the evolution of dance’s interaction with the cinematic frame through analogue and digital technologies. The experiments were exhibited in the Digital Media Art Lab, a large pop-up shop of fourteen rooms where they were choreographed across multiple screens to create a site-specific playful and responsive multi-media installation. The audience as visitors to the lab were invited to bring their sense of curiosity and to explore how they could interact with the experiments.

BIO

Margie Medlin

Margie Medlin has been working as an artist in the field of dance and media arts for thirty years – having lit and designed new dance performances and collaborated with many choreographers and directors including Carol Brown, Russell Dumas, Lucy Guerin, Rebecca Hilton, John Jaspers, Russell Maliphant, Gideon Obarzanek, Sandra Parker, Ong Keng Sen and Ros Warby. Throughout her creative practice, Margie has continued to experiment and forge new ground aesthetically, collaboratively and technically. She has created many and varied multi-screen installations using early analogue and digital technologies, through to state of the art high end digitally controlled systems utilizing live video, motion capture, motion control technologies, and Robotics.

Margie was the Director of Critical Path, Choreographic Research Centre, Sydney, Australia between 2007 and 2015 and is currently creating and teaching in Berlin.

Please see Margie’s website for details.

BIO

Nikki Heywood

Nikki Heywood is a performer and performance creator with a deep focus on embodiment. With a long professional practice centred upon devising and directing original movement-based performance work, she is creatively informed by early influence of Grotowski, Body Weather, and the somatic practice Body-Mind Centering. Her long-standing improvisational practice, often working with musicians, has resulted in a body of work spanning solo and collaborative performance. Her work has toured inter/nationally.

Alongside a personal practice, Heywood has informed a generation of performance artists over several decades leading and participating in collective creation and collaboratively devised projects, running skills-based workshops for students and emerging practitioners and assisting the creative process of many artists as a mentor and dramaturg. Awarded a highly commended Doctorate of Creative Arts in 2016, (thesis title – Undoing Discomfort: being real/becoming other in an embodied performance practice, University of Wollongong), Heywood is currently working with collaborator Mark Cauvin on an existential dance/opera called ‘Broadcast into Oblivion’.