October 2021

News, events and opportunities!

Welcome to the latest edition of the C-DaRE Newsletter. Here we highlight the centre's most recent activities, academic achievements, upcoming events and opportunities. For more details, please read on!

For any queries about the items below contact cdare.fah@coventry.ac.uk.

News

Congratulations to Dr Kathryn Stamp on being shortlisted for National Dance Award!

“The One Dance UK Awards shortlist was released on September 1st and featured a member of the C-DaRE team. These awards are intended to be "an annual celebration for people from across the dance sector to unite, celebrate, acknowledge and reward the people who have made an impact on the vibrant UK dance landscape". C-DaRE's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Kathryn Stamp, has been shortlisted for the Research in Dance Award, celebrating her AHRC-funded PhD research (in collaboration with People Dancing) and her current postdoctoral research, exploring disabled dancers' lived experiences of remote working and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The awards ceremony will be held online on 19th November. For more information, please visit the One Dance Uk Awards Website.

Marie-Louise Crawley awarded a Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities-Hosking Houses Trust Creative Arts & Writers’ Fellow Residency 2021

Marie-Louise Crawley was delighted to be awarded a Centre for Arts Memory and Communities /Hosking Houses Trust Creative Arts and Writers’ Fellow Residency 2021 and undertook her month-long residency at Church Cottage, Clifford Chambers, during September 2021:

During her residency, Marie-Louise worked on an emerging dance practice-research project, Monumental Bodies, Monumental Acts. The project’s aim is to make a claim for dance in the museum or in other heritage settings as a potentially subversive and radical act of archaeology, in terms of how it plays on notions of dismembering and remembering histories, specifically those female histories previously erased or rendered partially invisible by an arguably patrilineal museum culture. Marie-Louise used the dedicated time and space of the residency to develop a new solo dance work, which took as its starting-point a re-interrogation of Coventry’s Godiva (and representations of Godiva in local and regional art historical collections), as well as to work on related writings about this practice-research. Marie-Louise offers her thanks to Sarah Hosking and the Hosking Houses Trust for the warm hospitality and support extended during the residency, as well as to Juliet Simpson at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Community.

C-DaRE Presence at the AHRC City of Culture Summit

C-DaRE Researchers Rosa Cisneros and Emma Meehan presented at the 24th - 25th of June Cultural Policy and Evaluation Summit. You can catch up on the day via the YouTube link. 

Image: AHRC City of Culture

The AHRC Coventry Cultural Policy and Evaluation Summit which Cisneros and Meehan participated in has published a summary. The Summit Rapporteur John Knell, has captured the richness of the debate and we offer here a selection of the important strands covered. From the document you can link to all of the sessions on YouTube and recap on the key moments and contributions, AHRC Summit Summary

We have also provided a link to the evaluation of the place research collaborations featured at the Summit for your interest.  Cisneros contributed to the  Coventry Creates Report.

Body as Archive, Archive as Score: Cycles Dance Company 1974-1982

C-DaRE Post Graduate Researcher Rachael Davis ​is currently collaborating with Chisenhal Dance on Body as Archive, Archive as Score is a research project and exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery & Museum reflecting on the local area’s dance history and legacy of artist-led networks, with a focus on the work of Cycles Dance Company.

This exhibition brings together a collection of historical material related to Cycles and its work. In doing so, it provides the opportunity to consider the company’s legacy and its on-going influence on those involved and those who encountered its work through performances and teaching.

Image credits: One Against One (1976), choreographed by Tamara McLorg, performed by Rosanne Donohoe, Craig Givens, Julian Hough, Sally Sykes and Judy Webb, photograph by Peter Donohoe

This exhibition is generously supported by UK City of Culture 2021, Arts Council England, Midland4Cities, Rugby Borough Council, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum. 

The exhibition will run from 4th October 2021 – 15th January 2022 find out more here.

Post Graduate Researcher News

C-DaRE welcomes Zrinka Uzbinec who has started a Midlands4Cities (M4C) fully funded studentship with a practice research project titled A Cute Crash. Cutting Through Violence With Choreography And Cuteness.

Also on a Midlands4Cities fully funded studentship, we welcome Georgina Cockburn who starts her Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with People Dancing and a project entitled: Dance as a catalyst for living well; examining the potential for Living Well Hubs to improve people’s lives through dance. We also welcome PhD candidates Samantha Harper Robins and Robert Bamberger.

Earlier this year, C-DaRE started the cotutelle programme Mobilizing Dramaturgy lead by C-DaRE's Prof Susanne Foellmer with Aarhus University, Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology (Prof. Dr. Peter M. Boenisch). Two PGR students have begun their research in May: Miranda Laurence, with a project on Bodies in Space and Time: conceptualising dance dramaturgy through interaction with architectural thinking, and Rosa Postlethwaite, with a practice research project on Dramaturgy with other-than-human species.

Louisa Petts presenting at the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS) 31st Annual Conference, Denver Live. 

Louisa Petts is presenting at the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS) 31st Annual Conference, Denver Live. She is presenting as part of one of the Special Interest Group Days, A Day for Dance for Health, held virtually on Sunday 24th October. Her presentation looks at her MSc Dance Science research project titled, An exploration into the experience of family caregivers for people living with dementia in a community dance class.

The study conducted an empirical exploration of three family caregivers perceived psychosocial wellbeing when regularly participating in community dance classes. This research study is also Accepted/In Press as an article for the Research in Dance Education journal. You can register to attend here!

Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events this November:

International Journal for Romani Studies Webinar: Gypsies, Roma and Travellers: Strengthening civil society 4th November 2021

This webinar will bring together two IJRS issues published in 2021: Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021); and Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021). Speakers will present their work engaging in a debate that will explore the strategies that Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers are implementing on the ground and which are strengthening civil society. Some of the topics to be explored have been on the current agenda for being highly polemical: Shamus McPhee's paper on the The Uglier Side of Bonnie Scotland: the Tinker Housing Experiments or so this is not a game - Brexit as a ‘situation of uncommon precarity’ for migrants of Roma heritage in the UK  " by Philip B. Martin.

We will also have grassroots community voices from Hungary and Greece with Anikó Orsós and the Amrita Association discussing how Education Transforms Lives: from Deep Poverty to Cultural Agent and Activist and the importance of empowerment through the Erasmus+ Nefeli Project for Roma women with Theofano Papakonstantinou and Dimitrios Alexandros Ladopoulos. The webinar will also look at the labour market with Participation in paid employment among the Finnish Roma with Simo Mannila, Anu E Castaneda, Marianne Laalo, Hannamaria Kuusi.

Dialogic Literary Gathering and Opening Up Spaces of Meaning Creation and Social Transformation for Roma People with Garazi Lopez de Aguileta (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be expanded on.

'The Shape of Sound' Installation and Performance as Part of the Being Human Festival 2021 Coventry Hub 11th - 20th November 2021

The installation/performance ‘The Shape of Sound’ is the first in a series of site specific works that explores a small part of our human embodiment – the hair cells inside the basilar membrane in the inner ear. This research through making by artist-researcher Petra Johnson (PhD) working in collaboration with Vipavinee Artpradid (PhD) and researchers in C-DaRE Lily Hayward-Smith, Dr Karen Wood, and Louisa Petts is part of the Being Human Festival 2021.

A second event will take place at two historical venues in Coventry next year. Each performance will engage with questions evoked by the site.

Open Rehearsal

The first stage of this process-based work will be presented as an open rehearsal, in which Lily, Karen, and Louisa explore a scaled up installation by Petra consisting of rows of individual wool/silk threads cascading from light weight poles. 

These performances will explore different aspects and we invite the audience/visitors to join us after each performance for informal discussions.

The performances will take place in the Performance Studio at the Institute for Creative Cultures (Coventry Technology Park). Full information can be found here.

We invite you to comment and engage pro-actively by exploring the installation yourself after the performance and by responding and adding to the texts we are working with. Experiencing sound as touch and movement may evoke anecdotal recollections of how sound and silence felt in times of isolation, during lockdown. 

The performance times are as follows:

11th November 2021  

• 11am performance followed by discussion
• 1pm performance followed by discussion

The studio will remain open to the public in between these times 

16th November 2021

• 3pm performance followed by discussion 

Booking

You can book to attend this event and others in the Coventry Hub here.

For enquiries please contact Lily Hayward-Smith

Recent Events

Student-Centred Learning in a Pandemic: how can we motivate virtually October 7th to 10th 2021

Dr Trish Melton presented some of her early ethnographic pedagogy research: Student-Centred Learning in a Pandemic: how can we motivate virtually?; at the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) Annual Conference on October 10th, 2021.  The conference focused on The essentiality of dance education in changing times.  In her paper Trish discussed the impact of the pandemic on the dance community in rural Ireland.  She tells a story about her community practice and how we change one thing in our pedagogy and deliver unexpected benefits for learners. The work explores teaching for creativity and learner motivation.

Conference 2021 - National Dance Education Organization (ndeo.org)

Prof Susanne Foellmer delivered a keynote address on Teil-Haben? Teil-Sein? [Participating? Being Part Of…?] at Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung [Dance Research Society] Germany, event Sharing Dancing, 18 Sept 2021, together with Prof. Dr. Yvonne Hardt and Angela Alves, Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg. 

Prof Susanne Foellmer gave a keynote speech on Still moving, nevertheless. Questions about utopia in our contemporary moment at annual conference of the Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars (ANTS): Utopia and Performance, Stockholm University, 2 Oct 2021. 

Gather Together Here: Rosemary Lee received a grant from Creative Scotland which funded a series of workshops in September 2021.

Image: Passage for Par by Rosemary Lee  Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018. Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Photo: © Steve Tanner

Independent dance practitioners from across Scotland applied to take part in these paid opportunities designed to bring a wide range of independent artists of all ages together to share their practice and replenish themselves. Rosemary was able to research and develop her practice of facilitating artist gatherings and of working somatically, and investigate how that might be possible in outdoor settings. Gather Together Here is the first step in a large-scale project she hopes to mount in June 2022 which will involve presenting a new version of Threaded Fine in two outdoor settings (in Dundee and Findhorn), with a cast of 30 professional and non-professional intergenerational performers from across Scotland. 

Projects

VIBES project workshop days

In September, the VIBES project team worked with 6 dancers to try a first draft of choreographic protocol for the mobile phone app.  The dancers collaboration was important to further the choreographic experience and for the team to enrich the protocol. This was the first time in the studio for some of the team and the dancers so it was strange and wonderful simultaneously! Thank you to the dancers – Rebecca Randall, Genevieve Say, Maiya Leeke, Ashley Jordan, Lexy Garner and Ben Morley -  for collaborating with us and helping us think deeply about our bodies in space and in relation to each other. 

Image: VIBES LabDay

For more information please see the VIBES website.

You can also read about these project events on the ​Birmingham dance network and Ascension Dance sites.

Orchard Portraits October 2021

Orchard Portraits (working title). In October 2021 Rosemary begins a period of research with film-maker collaborator Roswitha Chesher in the old orchard at West Horsley Place, Surrey. Commissioned by Surrey Hills Arts, she will be developing a site responsive video work she imagines will result in a series of digital portraits of elderly performers each with an apple tree, accompanied by dozens of children. As development for the project, Rosemary will also lead a CPD day Surrey Dance 21- Adapting to Place, aimed primarily at dance artists living and/or working in Surrey, but also open to others from outside the county to explore her practice of site responsive and participatory work. 

Rosemary was also invited to the contribute to the concluding session of the EDN Online Forum- Are you here? Dance and its Audience on 12 October 2021. Co-organised by The Place and Sadler’s Wells. 

Music For Lectures - Get Lost!

Music For Lectures/Get Lost is a talk by Wendy Houstoun about lostness, with C-DaRE Associate Professor Jonathan Burrows on drums, Francesca Fargion on synth and Matteo Fargion on bass, performed at Hebden Bridge on 9 October 2021

DaReImage: Get Lost!

Music For Lectures/Get Lost is part of an ongoing series which invites someone to give a talk, backed by a rock band. The project continues Burrows' and Fargion's interest in visiting the practice of other artists and being visited in return. Burrow’s commitment to exploring meaningful connections with other makers and thinkers is also evident here in his April 2021 conversation with the surgeon and academic Professor Roger Kneebone Countercurrent Podcast for people who like the unexpected.

RTransform is part of the UK’s National Inclusion Week (Sept 27th- Oct 3rd,  2021)

National Inclusion Week is designed to celebrate everyday inclusion in all its forms. This is the 9th year Inclusive Employers has brought organisations together from across the globe to celebrate, share and inspire inclusion practices.

Roma Women transforming the educational systems around Europe through their social and political mobilizations (RTransform) addresses a main challenge which is social inclusion with the potentiality of promoting education among Roma women and girls. PI for the Project, Rosa Cisneros is overseeing the Quality Assurance strand of the Erasmus+ project. The consortium partner Care for Young People’s Future  hosted an event and the RTransform Project was presented. C-DaRE’s Cisneros also contributed to the event by discussing the importance of arts and culture in relation to  social and political impact.

A video about the event can be viewed here. 

Siobhan Davies's digital film Transparent

Siobhan Davies is in the process of making a digital film titled Transparent with the film director David Hinton and Noriko Okaku an animation artist and editor. David and Siobhan have been involved in this project for three years and are now reaching the end. Inspired by the project Immemory from the film maker Chris Maker, Transparent is also an extension of Transparencies, a research through practice in which the choreographic practice becomes a memory finder, uncovering and separating out former investigations as a way to renew and recognise the complexities of past interactions and to understand better what dance can include in current and future enquiries.

Siobhan says: "The film project is also testing how as a maker how I might de-centralise myself from the extraordinary meshwork of people, events, arts that we all exist within and because of. To discover a useful distance from the more predictably structured and hierarchical memories I have of learning to dance, perform and choreograph." 

Image: Overhead shot of Transparencies images laid out on a white surface © Hugo Glendinning

David and Siobhan have previously made two films together, each one reached a wide audience and have been critically acclaimed. One of these, All this Can Happen, a film constructed entirely from archive photographs and footage from the earliest days of cinema and based on Robert Walser’s novella ‘The Walk’ (1917), was the subject of a full issue of the International Journal of Screendance (2016)BI. Once Transparent is finished in the New Year, Siobhan hopes it will also serve as a useful public platform for thinking in new ways about dance and memory.

EU-Funded project WEAVE 

The C-DaRE WEAVE project team (Rosa Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley, Sarah Whatley) is pleased to report that the first project LabDays are now well underway. 
The first online event, our Digital Innovation of Cultural Heritage: 3D Modelling of Cultural Heritage LabDay, took place on 1st October 2021. It was co-created by ARCTUR (Slovenia) and moderated by COVUNI (C-DaRE). The aim of the workshop was to offer information about the digital innovation of cultural heritage in a holistic manner, including various aspects of digital innovation, with the main focus on 3D objects.

Image: courtesy Univesidade Nova de Lisboa

ARCTUR was joined by WEAVE project coordinator IN2 (Germany) for a WEAVE project introduction and WEAVE colleagues at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) to discuss the MotionNotes tool, an open web-based video annotator for both video streams and recorded videos which focus on the annotation of movements, targeting dance and performance professionals. Topics covered during the LabDay included: 

• The advantages of investing in cultural heritage tourism. 
• A short presentation of the development of interactive experiences (3D movie, hologram, 3D printing, virtual tours with the 3D objects, interactive table with 3D objects, enriched reality, VR360movie with the 3D objects, VR games, etc.) 
• How to prepare a good concept with defined target groups and user experience. 
• Cooperation of key stakeholders in the process of digitisation and the digitalisation of cultural heritage.
• The digitising process: digital capture, point clouds, photogrammetry and laser scanning, data processing, simulated reconstructions on practical case studies of cultural heritage objects.  

A recording of the LabDay will shortly be available on the WEAVE YouTube channel.

                                Publications

Papers published:

Rosa Cisneros and Dan Strutt (GoldSmiths)  Virtual relationships: the dancer and the avatar. 

Daniel Bisig (C-DaRE Marie Curie Fellow) and Kıvanç Tatar have been presented with the Best Paper Award for Raw Music from Free Movements: Early Experiments in Using Machine Learning to Create Raw Audio from Dance Movements at the 2nd AI Music Creativity Conference 18-22 July 2021. Graz, Austria. 

Crawley, M.-L. (2021), The Fragmentary Monumental: Dancing Female Stories in the Museum of Archaeology’ in ChoreoNarratives: Dancing Stories in Greek and Roman Antiquity and beyond, edited by K. Schlapbach and L. Gianvittorio-Ungar (Brill). 

Crawley, M.-L. (2020) Dance as Radical Archaeology, Dance Research Journal 52.2, 88-100. 

Crawley, M.-L. (2020) This a different angle: Dancing at the Louvre, Danza e Ricerca 12(12), 283-296.

Cisneros, R. and Crawley, M.-L. (2021) Moving, annotating, learning: MotionNotes LabDays - a case study’, International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media 17.1, p. 138-149

Books published:

Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices

JDSP Submissions

We are currently closed for new submissions until January 2022. This is so we can work through the large number of current submissions we have in process. If you have any questions about this please contact the editors at jdsp@coventry.ac.uk.

Call for Reviewers

We are currently looking to expand our group of reviewers for the journal. We are looking for reviewers with knowledge and expertise in the broad field of dance and somatic practices. If you have an interest in becoming a reviewer for our journal or would like any more information please contact us at the email above.

Associates News

WIPO Conversation on Intellectual Property and Frontier Technologies (Fourth Session)

In Memoriam Bob Rutman (1931-2021): The Final Output - Adrian Palka (SMPA/C-DaRE)

Palka, A. (2015) ‘Improvisations towards an origin: The Steel Cello and Bow Chime’, in Doğantan-Dack, M. (ed.), Artistic Practice As Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 

As many of you know I have been engaged with the work of renegade US/German sound artist Bob Rutman for several years in my role as assistant professor in SMPA and C-DaRE research associate. Sadly Bob passed away on June 1st this year aged 90 and a memorial for him was held in Berlin in mid September. About 50 people turned up and at this event I can honestly say that my research and practice outputs had the most poignant impact of anything I have ever done.

Bob was renowned for his musical sculptures the Steel Cello and Bow Chime which he created in the artistic ferment of late 1960s/70s New York. He always lived on the edge and close to the epicentre of artistic energy. He collaborated with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars. Returning to Berlin, the city of his birth, after the fall of the wall, he worked with Wim Wenders, Eisturzende Neubauten and Heiner Goebbels amongst others.

My work on Bob involved my own practice, collaborations with him, documentation and publications. He visited us in Performing Arts several times, and alumni still remember his gruff charm and mesmerising sounds. Our performance of Dislocation at Coventry Cathedral in 2007, was one of the highpoints of my 20 years at CU. At the memorial I was able to disseminate the remaining sound recordings of that event to an interested, grateful and thoughtful audience. I also showed a short film tribute to him, which showed a “Steel Cello” slowly swamped by the incoming sea.  In this context, the appreciation of this work (always strongly supported by Sarah Whatley) and its impact, was palpable.

The next phase of the work will be around Bob’s legacy and funding applications have been submitted to German funders for a lecture/performance/exhibition tour entitled Bob Rutman: the man who caressed Steel. Lets hope that for the man who created the most extraordinary sounds, there will now be Peace.  We will honour his memory. Bob, RIP.

Thank you for reading!