The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Conversation pieces

This exhibition presented works by Australian artists Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe and Hannah Raisin and collaborative works by Catherine or Kate (Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft), Scott Ferguson (Erika Scott and Brooke Ferguson) and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann. These artists engage with ideas of contemporary feminism through processes of dialogue and exchange, exploring subjectivity, humour and intimacy in performance and installation artworks. These works are generated by physical, verbal or textual dialogues between collaborators, participants or the artist and audience; and spark a conversation about feminist art practice today.

Haptically-enabled dance visualisation framework for deafblind-folded audience and artists

In this paper we propose a framework for communicating performance art to deaf, blind and deafblind audiences and artists haptically through the sense of touch. This research opens doors for novel artistic trends relying mainly on the sense of touch. The paper investigates the design considerations dictated by solo and group dances as well as stage setup. Implementation scenarios for deafblind audiences and performers are also discussed.

Entwinement

This is an original performance art work, entirely improvised in a live performance space. It incorporated improvised creative writing projected into the performance space and improvised trumpet playing, working with themes of everyday emotional experiences in relationship to environmentalist- and deep-ecology-related themes and concerns.

The forest within

This is an original work of live improvision performance art. Themes in focus are local and human ecologies and daily practices.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

This thesis argues that the perceptual apparatus required to view abstract and graphic films can illuminate our understanding of trauma as a social/medical concept. such 'materialist' films predict the new contemporary 'Gestalt of the senses' ushered in by digital media.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving ...

Cameras and body memory create new blends of performance with visual art practice

I propose that a learnt somatic experience of dance can translate into another discipline such as visual art. In my visual art practice I combine both photography, which is traditionally seen as a still medium, and performance in order to create a new form of embodiment. I have developed two series of art works of prints and video made in response to the Australian landscape. By analyzing my method of movement and photography I will describe how an embodied dance language can result in a material outcome – a series of drawings of light and movement, a body signature made possible through old and new technology. I have activated a performative state while capturing images discovering new ways of using technology reliant upon my knowledge of dance, performance and photography. Making a human size camera to make analogue prints I gained an intuitive knowledge of light – a skill that has become foundational in performance and photography. In response to space and light in the Australian landscape I then built a custom made camera that allows for the longest possible time to capture an image. I move while taking the image and use the camera as if an eye at the end of my arm. In this way I activate dance skills and embodied knowledge of space, timing and light, opening up a radical space for new thinking, making and performing.Furthermore this process engages memory and sentiment embodied through age. Many artists have responded to the unique qualities of the Australian landscape and by using a performative/photographic approach I have engaged with my own body memory. Being brought up in the landscape and training in ballet my body has acquired memories at a cellular level. My method has given memory a voice. In doing these works I have become conscious of how unconscious memories of the space and light in the landscape is a movement vocabulary activated in a way that ‘feels’ like dancing. As an ageing person this experience is profound and the resultant materialisation of the photographs and videos leave a material record of the event. The sentiments evoked through my process bridge the past with the present, the body with the mind, memory with body and space connecting disciplines in a new way.The materialisation of artworks itself continues cross-disciplinary processes using a technique that is a continuum of the performative. Through using technology I release memory of the landscape and pixel by pixel build imagery that relies on and is a part of the performative process. It is a photographic performance dance manifesting as pigment on paper exhibited a gallery context. The exhibition allows a space for the viewer to respond - re-membering the universal the act of moving. The works titled ‘body signatures’ and ‘Fly Rhythm’ become a communicative device in the gallery context.My paper through an analysis of process and methods used in making the two series will talk to several of the subjects listed and reveal a new way of connecting performance and visual art and old and new technologies.

Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

A time for real building performance measurement

The Mobile Architecture and Built Environment Laboratory (MABEL) was conceived upon the principle of investigating building environmental performance in situ. MABEL provides the first means of integrated, on-site measurement of the key aspects of internal built environments; energy, lighting, air quality, ventilation, acoustics and comfort using state-ofthe- art technology and instrumentation. The intention of this paper is to explain the how and what need to be measured in our buildings if we are to search of a genuine performance answer as well as the information to provide a solution. Several results of real building measurement are provided here, suggesting that a national program on 'as performing' is required if we are to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Art embodied and disembodied : expression, representation, and reflection

In this chapter a group of writers from very diverse academic backgrounds deal with the embodied and disembodied arts - from an exploration of dance with preschool children to the use of the webblog for eleven and twelve year olds to reflect on the creation of a group performance about how to change the world. The Deans & Young case study takes the reader into the world of the preschooler and the delicate craft of the dance and drama teachers who guide their small dancers through myriad choreographic and conceptual tasks in their pursuit of kinaesthetic learning. Jo Raphael allow the young bloggers to speak from themselves in her case study. How to Change the World. Through the voices of the Year 6 students, Jo raises the critical question of how to build meaningful reflection into the arts-making process, and suggests that for the current generation of 'cyber-natives', the digital world offers many great possibilities. Theory concerning forms of expression and representation in the embodies and digital world is also discussed.