At then end of May, I’m heading over to Dublin for the first phase of E-Motional Bodies and Cities artistic research with Mădălina Dan, Fearghus Ó Conchúir, Christos Polymenakos and Olga Zitluhina

This artistic research is the flagship element of the E-MOTIONAL project. A series of 5 cross-border working periods organised alternatively in Dublin, Riga, Limassol, London and Bucharest to question the emotional body and its relation with these cities.

Two different artistic teams embark upon a co-authorship process to explore the relation between the human body, the urban and geo-political context and new technologies. Each artistic team is composed of five artists, one from each country, who may also come from different disciplines. The groups will have the chance to interact, work and benefit from the support of three local dancers or other associated artists. Each research period will also include a number of workshops and video-lectures open to local participants and artists, and will conclude with an informal presentation open to the local audience in the respective city.

The artistic researchers are accompanied by Cosmin Manolescu (choreographer & E-MOTIONAL project leader) who will act as a facilitator during these residences.

Updates as the project begins…

My response Below the Waterline, a reflection on a conversation – as part of the live event – with Caroline Bowditch is featured in this unique resource, along with my photographic work accompanying performative writing from Catherine Long and Doran George.

The full press release can be downloaded on my In Touch page.

 ’Live Art is truly the avant-garde forum for Disability Art and at the forefront of Disability Art practice, thinking and theory.’ – Dr Paul Darke, 2011

Access All Areas is a new collection of artists’ writings, creative dialogues, critical commentaries and DVDs featuring documentation of artists’ presentations and performances spanning 20 years, which reflect the ways in which Live Art has represented issues of disability in inventive and radical ways.

Featured artists and writers include Jon Adams, Katherine Araniello, Ron Athey, Back to Back Theatre, Bobby Baker, Caroline Bowditch and Luke Pell, sean burn, The Disabled Avant-Garde, Pete Edwards, Extant, Mat Fraser, 15mm Films, Lyn Gardner, Girl Jonah, Tony Heaton, Raimund Hoghe, David Hoyle, Noëmi Lakmaier, Brian Lobel, Catherine Long, Rita Marcalo, Alan McLean and Tony Mustoe, Kim Noble, Martin O’Brien, Sinead O’Donnell, Maria Oshodi, Mary Paterson, Áine Phillips, Juliet Robson, Sheree Rose, Rajni Shah and Aaron Williamson.

www.thisisUnbound.co.uk

www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk

I am at a marked plot

an intersection

attempting to shift

Imagining a transformation

A/void, a leap, an unknown visibility, a quiet dirtied disturbance

I am mapping the peculiarities of this body in this place and then in that and then and then those in theirs

Short of breath

I am unearthing a re-knowing, some recognition, reconciliation

I am a muddied mess

which choices might come without killing this first

Without privileging just this one way of being making in these worlds

and in

and in

and in my mess it darkly, brightly seems

these terms may no longer be sufficient for our purposes

#21CL

 initial thoughts as part of 21st Century Leadership at BAC

This summer I join Visual-Artist Rachel Gadsden, Artistic Director/Designer Ryan Laight and Filmmaker Abigail Norris to create The Starting Line, an outdoor performance for Aylesbury Town Square coinciding with the Paralypmic Torch journey from Stoke Mandeville to the Olympic Stadium on 28 August 2012.

Taking our inspiration from the Spirit and Vision of Paralympic Athletes and celebrating Stoke Mandeville as the birth place of the Paralympic Games, The Starting Line builds a dynamic universal performance collaboration between disabled and non-disabled young people from around the globe, spinally inured young people from Stoke Mandeville hospital and emerging young British Dance.

Further details coming soon.

In April 2011 Gadsden was awarded this New Outdoor Commission by Accentuate working in Partnership with Creative Junction.

Performance for camera for Predrag Pajdic’s new series – none that exist can perish - for full text see www.pajdic.com

showing at Magazijn, Amsterdam.

Image from performance for camera for Predrag Pajdic’s noetic corpus: sojourn of the soul 

As I embark upon a new year, new journeys,  I am fuelled by a rich summer of uncensored play and creative conversation with visual artist Liz Atkin.  A little summer light in this grey January cant go amiss.

I am currently working with emerging performers from Candoco Dance Company’s youth groups to create a site-sensitive installation Marginalia from a Phantom Library to be performed as part of Fresh at The Place in London on Sat 3 December 2011 

Images from Liz Atkin and Luke Pell’s new collaborative series ‘In Conversation’ arose from their meeting in February 2011.   A shared understanding of each other’s unique physical patterning and movement memory serves as a departure point from which to render visible, intimate acts of transformation. Working with abandoned everyday spaces and materials, Atkin and Pell surrender – through spontaneous improvisation – to their own embedded corporeal histories and those of the environments they encounter. 

The first two works within the series are Throat Pieces (performed by Pell) and They Come Not As Single Sparrows but in Battalions (performed by Atkin).  In witnessing these private performative happenings each photograph is considered synonymous with traumatic experience in its capacity to carry information that cannot be conceived in the moment out, into another time, place and context.

Liz Atkin is a visual artist based in London. With a background in theatre and dance, physicality underpins her creative practice. Skin is her primary source for corporeal art, both as metaphorical membrane and physical boundary. Her work centres on a multilayered exploration of skin questioning the limits of the body and the potentials for communication across and within the porous textures of light and surfaces.  This personal investigation explores body focused repetitive behaviour resulting in a sometimes violent rendering of the body in order to condense it to matter for resculpting.