News, events and opportunities!
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March 2022
News, events and outputs
Welcome to the March 2022 edition of the C-DaRE Newsletter. We begin this month with deep concerns for the crisis in Ukraine and want to express our solidarity with friends, colleagues, students, artists and fellow academics who are facing such traumatic and dangerous times.
We also celebrate all our women who are making such an important contribution and difference to research everyday and especially on International Women’s Day on March 8.
We say a farewell to Mônica Fagundes Dantas, Visiting Professor from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. Monica has visited us on several occasions as part of our ongoing collaboration between C-DaRE and UFRGS and we have very much valued her being with us for the last three months. A video of her session will be coming soon to our YouTube channel.
For any queries about the items below contact cdare.fah@coventry.ac.uk.
International Women's Day 2022 #BreakTheBias
Image: C-DaRE
C-DaRE supports International Women's Day and we want to recognise all our wonderful staff and students, for the hard work you do and all you have and will achieve, well done all!
Upcoming Events
WEAVE Capacity Building LabDays
Image: WEAVE
We have a full calendar of WEAVE events programmed for Winter-Spring 2022, further capacity building workshops with cultural communities led by the C-DaRE WEAVE team (Rosa Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley and Sarah Whatley) will explore ways of improving communities’ engagement with tangible and intangible heritage. Events run between 11th February and 18th March 2022 for the full calendar of events please see here.
Tap Dance Research Network UK Research Festival
Image: WEAVE
TDRNUK Research Festival – co-ordinated by C-DaRE and CIRID (DMU) . Tap Dance Research Network UK present a programme of events that brings together tap dance performers, artists, scholars and researchers throughout the UK and North America. Whether you tap dance or not, or are simply tap-curious, TDRN UK welcomes everyone to join us as we delve into the richness and diversity of research and creative practices in tap dance today.
Featuring C-DaRE’s Rosa Cisneros on a panel entitled ‘Foot Percussion Discussion’ and Karen Wood and Trish Melton delivering an Education Panel. See here to book.
Marie-Curie Fellow Presentation
On 6th May 2022, between 2-4 pm, C-DaRE’s Marie Curie Fellow, Daniel Bisig will be presenting his research on recording and synthesising dance data (both quantitative and qualitative) for improving the creative possibilities of working with dance in the digital domain at the Centre for Computer Science and Mathematical Modelling. To read more information about Daniel’s research visit his project website.
C-DaRE Invites...
On 18th May 2022, between 1-2.30 pm, the Human Centered-ness Project and GAP_E team (see below) will host a C-DaRE Invites… event to present its current projects and plans. This C-DaRE Invites… builds on the Bodies, AI, Ethics and Diversity event held in November 2020 (read more about that event on the CU research blog). And to learn more about how the Ethics, AI and dance work at C-DaRE began, check out this video that reflects on the WhoLoDance project. We look forward to seeing you in May.
The 6th International Dance and Somatic Practices Conference
13th - 16th July 2023
We are pleased to announce the dates for the next Dance and Somatic Practices conference which will take place in Coventry, UK in July 2023. The conference will be in person and include paper presentations, practice research sharing, workshops and more from the international somatic community. There will be online offerings as part of the conference. A call for proposals is expected to be shared this summer.
Image: DSP Conference 2019 by Christian Kipp
M4C Dialogue Day: Gender in/and Design
Following a successful bid for the M4C Dialogue Day fund, Emma Waight will be running the event ‘Gender in/and design: Scoping challenges and opportunities in the Midlands’ at the Institute for Creative Cultures on Thursday 17th March from 10am – 3pm, in collaboration with Alessandro Columbano (Birmingham City University). With a keynote from Nat Maher, founder of Kerning the Gap, the event aims to bring together like-minded researchers, lecturers and industry in order to discuss and identify issues related to gender in/and design. Click below to register for this event.
Recent events
Listening to Grace: Embodying Hidden Pasts, Imagining Just Futures
Image: DANSOX St Hilda's College Oxford
On 7th February 2022, Marie-Louise Crawley (C-DaRE, Coventry University) was in conversation with Marcus Bell (St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford) on ‘Listening to Grace: Embodying Hidden Pasts, Imagining Just Futures’. This online seminar formed part of University of Oxford/DANSOX’s Interrogating the Dance ‘Classics’ series and TORCH’s Dance as Grace: Paradoxes and Possibilities series. A recording of the seminar is available here.
VIBES Outdoor experience update
Image: Vibes
Thanks to everyone that took part in the Vibes testing at University Square on the 10th and 11th February. More information on the project and future events are here: VIBES.
News
Kauma Brief Encounters – Global Frameworks for Creative Exchange (Part I and Part II)
Image: Jessica Choi
Rosa Cisneros and Jade Ward were awarded funding from the Policy Support Funds to run a project that explores dance and policy reform, facilitate creative exchanges that nurture sector changes. Working with Mercy Nabirye, the Kauma Arts team and Maria Polodeanu from Reel Master Productions the project builds on from work Kauma Arts generated last year through their Kauma Brief Encounters (KBE’s). The KBE’s brought together creatives and key leaders to share and exchange ideas, cultivate collaborations and deepen the artistic value for artforms within the African Diaspora and Africa, offering the provocation - How do we create a level playing field for creative exchange across diasporas and the continent? The new project aims to continue to provide a platform that connects communities and works towards an action plan.
Orchard Portraits
Image: Rosemary leading workshop in the orchard in during research for Orchard Portraits. Image Alison Clarke.
Rosemary Lee begins creating and filming Orchard Portraits over the next month in the orchard at West Horsley Place, Surrey with long term collaborator film maker Roswitha Chesher. The project is commissioned by Surrey Hills Arts and funded by the Arts Council England and is part of Surrey Dance 21.They are working with six local people in their 70s and 60 local school children to create a seven-screen video installation which will run continually through the day with six synced portrait screens and one landscape placed in different rooms in the house.
Building on ideas begun in their award-winning Liquid Gold is the Air, particularly the potential of the combination of portrait and landscape orientations and traditions, their interest here is in conveying the quiet relationship of older human and aged fruit tree, and exploring a unifying compositional structure for all screens that involves shooting the figure and tree from wide shot into extreme close up and back out again over 15 minutes. The work will open at the end of July, see here for full information.
Threaded Fine Scotland
Image: Matilda Lee-Kronick performing in Circadian (from which Threaded Fine has been developed) First Light Festival, 2019. Image Mykola Romanovsky.
Rosemary Lee has begun working on a large-scale project supported by Creative Scotland with partners Dance North Scotland and Scottish Dance Theatre. She will be working between Dundee and Findhorn over two months, with 24 dancers from across Scotland, ranging in age from 9 to 70 plus including 6 company members from Scottish Dance Theatre. Threaded Fine will be performed in Findhorn June 11 and Dundee June 18 in outdoor green spaces.
The intergenerational five-hour work explores repetition, ritual, duration and score making and interpretation. Each soloist starting with the youngest and ending with oldest perform the same solo one after the other within a 5 metre circle, accompanied by a looping song by Isaac Lee-Kronick.
This is the first time Rosemary has worked on two different sites with the same cast and in green sites on grass. The previous iteration took place indoors in Malta with Zfin Malta national dance company, Malta, in 2020. Full information here.
Researching the dance ecology of Coventry: resilience, creativity & imagining the future
Scott Delahunta, Rosa Cisneros and Karen Wood launched the ‘Researching the dance ecology of Coventry: resilience, creativity and imagining the future’ working with Ascension Dance. This opportunity to engage with professional dance practice in Coventry offers C-DaRE the chance to apply research thinking and approaches locally and to engage and develop practice research methodologies including participatory, collaborative, and embodied methods. C-DaRE’s investigations into dance artists’ working conditions and ethics in studio practice will serve as a foundation for further research in these areas. Ascension Dance will be contributing to a C-DaRE Invites with the research team in the near future.
Congratulations Dr Karen Wood
Karen Wood was successful in securing a British Academy Innovation Fellowship for a 12 month period investigating freelance dance artists and representation. The project will bring together freelance dance artists, representative agencies, policy makers, organisations and academics with a view to inform and influence public opinion, policy and practice. Look out for events to follow.
Publications
Roma in Europe
Image: Jo Gorniak
“Roma in Europe: Toby and Jo Gorniak from Street Factory with Rosa Cisneros” in Open Access Government, Feb 2022- Read here
The Roma community is the largest ethnic minority in Europe, and it remains one of the most disadvantaged groups. Toby Gorniak MBE, a Polish Roma man who was forced to migrate to the UK due to Anti-Gypsyism, is running the community interest company Street Factory in Plymouth, UK, an example of a company using Hip Hop to transcend boundaries and are delivering high-quality dance, theatre and mentoring programmes that lead to social transformation, read the full publication here "Roma in Europe: Toby and Jo Gorniak from Street Factory with Rosa Cisneros”
Image: Approaches to Dance
Whatley, S. (2022) ‘Approaches to Dance. Moving, teaching, thinking, writing: a minor excavation’ in Dance Research, Vol. 40: 1.
Sarah Whatley was invited by the Journal’s Editor to contribute to this special series, which features semi-biographical accounts by leading international dance scholars.
Mapping a City’s Energy
Image: Godiva Awakes, Imagineer Productions [2020]Coventry City Centre (Coventry, UK). Photo: Antony Weir
Cisneros, R., Crawley, M-L., Whatley, S., (2021) Mapping a City’s Energy: using digital storytelling to facilitate embodied experiences of urban space and place, in Streetnotes, 27 (p.46-65)
Mapping a City’s Energy: using digital storytelling to facilitate embodied experiences of urban space and place, looks at how embodied knowledge of the city can be shaped by the intentional movement of dance and sensory mapping experiments, through a close examination of two different movement practices undertaken as part of the Dancing Bodies in Coventry (DBiC) project. The essay also explores the different ways in which embodied experiences of urban space and place are documented, as well as what the hybridisation of the digital and the bodily might mean for how we understand and navigate our urban environments.
Blasing, B, Whatley, S. and Quinten, S (2022) ‘Dance and Disability’; Frontiers in Psychology; https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/10911/dance-and-disability
This special themed issue, co-edited with Bettina Blasing and Susanne Quinten (Department of Music and Movement in Rehabilitation and Education, Technical University Dortmund, Germany) features articles from researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, neuropsychology, dance studies, sports science, cognitive science, neuroscience, sociology, social sciences, education, disability studies and the arts. Topics link to related fields of research such as multi-sensory integration, body representation, spatial cognition, motor learning, embodied memory, embodied or non-verbal communication, and performance studies.
Diffraction and ‘In-Visible Light’ A case study of vertical dance
Image: Charlotte Wells
Cisneros, R., & Lawrence, K., (2021) Diffraction and ‘In-Visible Light’: A case study of Vertical dance in Performance Research, Volume 25 Issue 5
Feminism and Physics underpin the theory of Diffraction. This paper explores diffraction from the perspective of the dancing and performing body, using as a case study Vertical Dance Kate Lawrence’s (VDKL) Yn y Golau/In-visible Light (YYG), to make meaningful correspondences between phenomena in different mediums: dance/objects/scientific ideas/spoken word/music. We draw on Barad’s (2003) notion of ‘correspondences’ to highlight the connections between the various components in the performance space. Full article here.
Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices
JDSP Survey
A huge thank you to everyone that participated in our survey on journal publishing webinars, The results of the survey will inform how we develop this new webinar series on the different aspects of writing, reviewing, editing and publishing for journals. We will share more details of these webinars soon.
Special Issue 13.1-2 Out Now
Embodying Eco-Consciousness: Somatics, Aesthetic Practices & Social Action
With special Editors: Thomas Kampe, Katja Münder and Jamie McHugh
This Special Issue of the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices (JDSP) explores the possibilities and impact of somatic and aesthetic practices in the evolution of an embodied eco-consciousness within education, therapy, the performing arts and beyond. (Kampe, Münker McHugh 2021)
Find out more about the journal and purchasing options through Ingenta Connect.
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