CultureMoves

The C-DaRE (COVUNI) team is very happy to share that we have several upcoming CultureMoves LabDays planned for the next few weeks. In early November, we will be meeting with several artists, researchers, practitioners and dance experts in several exploratory LabDay workshops across the north of the UK.

We have a LabDay scheduled for the 4th November with the Slanjayvah Danza Company. The company works from various bases in England, Scotland and Spain with work being shown internationally. Established in 2004 by Jen Wren, the company produces high quality artistic dance productions as well as complementary education and participation programmes. They are inspired by real life, the arts, sciences and human wellbeing. The company aspires to entertain but also to inform and inspire the communities and individuals it works with. Their productions and choreographic works respond to stories and ideas which resonate with people of all ages from across a wide spectrum of culture and social groupings. Artistic director Jen Wren is a multi-skilled international dance artist and creative director with a passionate curiosity for the body and communicating stories through dance and film. For the LabDay, the company will join the CultureMoves team in the studio and use flamenco, Scottish step dance and contemporary choreography along with prop-work, to support theoretical and practical explorations of Europeana and the CultureMoves tools.  

Later that week, the COVUNI team will join forces with the UNL team to meet with Anton Mirto of London-based A2Company working under her own name (http://a2company.org/anton_mirto.htm) to explore the MotionNotes tool. Mirto and the team will look at footage from Mirto’s previous work and explore her choreographic and performance practice using this annotation tool. 

On Thursday 7th November, the CultureMoves team will lead an interactive workshop on the online tools at One Dance UK’s international conference in Salford, UK. Re:generations 2019. This biennial academic and artistic conference aims to share current practice and research in the field of dance of the African Diaspora and to explore further research, documentation and approaches to education in the field. It is an exciting opportunity for the team to share the tools with a wide range of dance artists, practitioners, scholars teachers and students from the Caribbean, Africa, the United States, Canada and the UK, as well as to the general public.

The busy week ends with a LabDay with dance artist-researcher Amy Voris in Manchester, UK. Amy’s practice is process-oriented and collaborative, driven by the desire to develop enduring relationships with people and with movement material.  The outcome of the work is contingent on hunches and interactions that occur during the process and varies widely. The CultureMoves team will be in the studio with Amy and other regionally based artists (Dani Abulhawa, Anna Macdonald, Sheila De Val Madsen, Shelley Owen and Ellen Jeffrey) to playfully explore Europeana and the CultureMoves tools.