News, events and opportunities!
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August 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
Dance Research Matters
Dance research is important. Stimulating and supporting the future of dance research in the UK
DRM2021 Event pack and in the Belgrade Theatre on 27th May 2021.
Did you miss this?
You can now catch up on all the presentations and discussions from the Dance Research Matters (DRM) event on 27th May 2021. The website continues to grow and now hosts some documentation from the day with more to come. There is some wonderful reading and listening to be had and can be found here.
The DRM campaign in ongoing. C-DaRE are continuing to work in partnership with the Arts and Humanities research council (AHRC) who will fund a series of activities and resources developed by C-DaRE that will support the future of the dance research sector in the UK. The DRM blog is open for comments and we welcome your thoughts and questions.
If you have any questions about the DRM campaign please contact Lily or Kate.
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 above. Please see Rosa's and Emma's reports below.
Urban Villages: The Roma Allotment
For the Research as cultural practice; giving space and voice to the seldom heard panel, chaired by Neil Forbes (Coventry University), Rosa Cisneros from C-DaRE was part of the session. As part of the AHRC City of Culture Summit, Rosa spoke about her broader work with local Roma families based in Coventry. She also invited Heidi Ashton from Warwick University to discuss their collaboration for the City of Culture partnership seed funding.
Urban Villages: The Roma Allotment Project aimed to bring together the Roma and non-Roma people to co-create a short film, images and a digital scrapbook exhibition that focuses on the experiences, identity and voices of the Roma people. The film was shared at an opening with Belgrade Theatre in June 2020.
The project is led by Rosa Cisneros (C-DaRE, Coventry University) and Dr Heidi Ashton (Centre for Culture and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick). The project worked closely with local creative Maria Polodeanu, director of Reel Master Productions, Bernie Flatley director of the Roma Project Charity and Tranca Family and other local Roma families.
Find out more about the project.
Watch the allotment project film.
View the co-created digital scrapbooks.
Cooking Connections Coventry
Image Credit: Emma Meehan
As part of the event, Emma Meehan (C-DaRE), Elaine O’Sullivan and Nese Tosun presented their project Cooking Connections Coventry. This included their collaboration with GroundWork West Midlands and participants from extra care homes in Coventry. Food boxes and sensory materials were delivered, along with phone calls with guided sensory relaxation activities. We addressed adapting the project to the pandemic, how the partnership collaboration worked, touching from a distance, as well as the legacy of the project with audio visual materials available here and here.
Goodbye to Yan Fu, Visiting Scholar from Jiang Xi University of Finance and Economics China
Photo: Yan Fu and Emma Meehan. Image Credit: Emma Meehan
Yan Fu, Visiting Scholar from Jiang Xi University of Finance and Economics, returned back to China safely in July. She arrived in Coventry in February 2020 and her research activities were quickly curtailed by the pandemic. However, Yan Fu and her two children settled into Coventry life and stayed for just under a year and a half.
Despite the pandemic, we have had an interesting exchange of ideas and cultures. Her research plan continued under reduced circumstances, however where possible she observed theatre and dance workshops and performances; with a special interest in differences between Chinese folk dance and contemporary Western dance aesthetics. Her interest was to bring back new ideas and practices into her dance teaching in China. Further, she was able to conduct independent study and research; and participate in Centre for Dance Research online activities.
As her host at C-DaRE, Emma Meehan has enjoyed walking together with Yan Fu and her family in the local parks when restrictions allowed, while also seeing her daughter sharing her Chinese folk dance skills and her son playing cello. Further, Emma also got a taste of delicious homemade dumplings by Yan Fu in her garden.
We very much look forward to future exchanges with Yan Fu and Jiang Xi University of Finance and Economics China. We wish Yan Fu and her children good luck for their two-week stay at a quarantine hotel in Guangzhou before she can return to her family home in Nanchang in Jiangxi province.
Rosa Cisneros (C-DaRE) to Deliver Keynote at the European Sociology Association Conference in Barcelona, Spain
Rosa Cisneros will be delivering a keynote speech at the European Sociology Association Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Her talk titled “Unfolding human agency: The case of grassroots Romani women” will focus on the intersectionality, Roma women and gender.
The EU recognizes that Roma is the most marginalized cultural community in Europe. The Roma issues are also marginalized even in the scientific studies about cultural groups. Furthermore, Romani women are marginalized even in women and gender studies. The result are opaque lenses that prevent science and society from seeing the deep transformations that the Roma feminist movements are creating in their community and in society. The worst consequence is that science and society are full of racist and sexist stereotypes about Roma women.
Romani feminism is one of the most important forces of transformation that has taken place in Europe in the last three decades. After centuries of being double or triple silenced, Roma women have been raising their voice, their concerns and creating our own spaces and discourses challenging long standing prejudices and stereotypes. Grassroots associations like the Drom Kotar Mestipen are just examples of how non- academic Romani women are getting organized, unfolding the full potential of human agency and transforming many oppressive structures, for instance, through deeply Roma women revolutionary international congresses. Amidst this context, new masculinities are also an emerging field of study and action led by many Roma men who are walking side by side with women to fight against any type of violence or subordination. Taking these analyses into consideration, Rosa will argue how the advancement of sociological theory, and more particularly, sociology of gender could be much benefited acknowledging these new and nearly not explored real utopias.
Inventing Embodiment Podcast
We invite you to tune in to the C-DaRE Inventing Embodiment podcast! In the last recording, our host, Jonathan Burrows, dwells on the main themes and ‘An act of letting go’. This episode concludes the season.
Many thanks to all our podcast guests! The whole series (17 episodes) is now available on SoundCloud.
Post Graduate Research News & Opportunities
Reflections from the C-DaRE PGR Symposium - Blog Post
C-DaRE PhD Researcher Charlie Ingram has written an insightful post on the 7th of June 2021 PGR Symposium. You can read the full event summary here.
Spotlight on PGRs!
In this section we keep spotlighting our PGRs and shouting about the great work they do. You can find out more about the C-DaRE PGR community on the dedicated website.
Helen Laws
Image Credit: Helen Laws
Who am I?
I’m a dance manager and researcher (can I officially say that now?!) who’s always had an interest in the performing arts, particularly dance and dancing, as well as in science and how research feeds into practice. I also tend to be driven to question and try to understand and find solutions to problems that might be deemed difficult or complex to tackle. I went on to work for some 20 years in several roles for the industry body One Dance UK and was instrumental in shaping its Healthier Dancer Programme.
Two of the most significant initiatives I led on were the research we carried out and published in 2005, Fit to Dance 2 – The report of the second national inquiry into dancers’ health and injury in the UK, which for me really cemented the need to bring together the UK’s leaders in dance medicine and science to collectively form the National Institute of Dance Medicine and Science (NIDMS) and establish the first NHS dance injury clinics, free at the point of use for all dance artists and teachers, in 2012. My then Director, Caroline Miller and I were recognized in the 2014 Evening Standard's 1000 most influential Londoners for this work which was an important moment for such a ‘niche’ initiative.
So fast forward to my PhD research, beginning in January 2021, and I’m hugely grateful that Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research, with the help of COVID-19 funding, had the foresight, passion and interest to invest in exploring the working practices and environment of freelance dance artists, who form such a substantial and integral part of the dance sector.
What is my research?
My research is titled: "An Investigation into resistance and representation: Freelance dance artists and the cultural ecology".
''I will be aiming to gain further insights into the collective engagement and representation of the freelance dance artist community and how their voices are heard and can feed into cultural policymaking and any changes required therein.''
As a part of this, I will be considering the impact that COVID-19 has had on the community, the systemic and infrastructural inadequacies it is highlighting, and how this might affect working practices and the wider dance ecology in the future. Broadly, I am asking how sustainable a freelance dance artist’s career is and what the primary elements are that impact on that. This is raising questions for me that on a more macro level have to do with how the performing arts generally, and dance within that, are valued in society and as an ‘industry’ by politicians.
When looking at the infrastructures that exist and form part of the dance and wider cultural ecology, I am planning to involve freelancers and stakeholders at all levels to interrogate what is working and what isn’t and formulate practical suggestions for what improvements might be needed/implemented to ensure better recognition and understanding of their role and more equitable reward for what they contribute.
It is my hope that my research, while examining as its primary focus this very specific portion of the cultural and creative industries, will also add in a small way to engage and give voice to them within the thinking and conversations around the government’s ‘Good Work’ agenda and fairer working practices for all workers whatever their employment status.
Project News
Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network -Moving Pain Online
Image Credit: Rob Young
We held a webinar on Moving Pain Online on 16th July which explored how dance and somatic practices can be shared through different technologies for people living with pain. Recordings (audio and video versions) of the webinar are available here.
The webinar also launched a series of short video practices made by and for people living with pain, that are also available on the website.
EU-Funded WEAVE Project
Rosa Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley and Sarah Whatley are busy planning WEAVE’s LabDays that are scheduled for the Autumn. In response to one of WEAVE’s central research questions, ‘What open and reusable digital tools can be developed for working with Cultural Heritage content?’, the Coventry team has been tasked with building up the capacity of Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) to work with digital intangible heritage and with cultural communities. We will produce practices and guidelines for CHIs concerning community engagement and management, materials for training, considering the available tools for social transformation and negotiation strategies.
To accomplish this, we will be developing a WEAVE methodological framework. This will specify hands-on methodologies, building on the LabDay methodology used in the CultureMoves Europeana Generic Service project for communities to engage with project activities and to select the content and collections to be aggregated.
Talking Back: Hip Hop Through Research and Practice Videos are Now Available Online to View
Talking Back: Hip Hop Through Research and Practice is grounded in feminist and critical theorist Bell Hook’s idea of “Talking Back”. This three-day event opened up a space to learn more about the five pillars of Hip Hop (Knowledge, style writing/graffiti, b-boying/breaking, Djing, Emceeing) and allowed artists and researchers to sit down and discuss their practice and reflect on their research. The event was directed by Rosa Cisneros (C-DaRE), Maria Polodeanu (Reel Master Productions), and Marius Mates (BreakDots Company).
UKRI Making Connections: Weaving, Dance and Coding
As part of the UKRI Making Connections Funding scheme Rosa Cisneros teams up with musician and researcher Alex McLean and coder Lucy Chesman. The trio have teamed up for the Making Connections: Weaving, Dance and Coding project to offer a series of explorative workshops in Sheffield. The project has two phases:
Phase 1: Run workshops with groups of young (11+) young people from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, bringing together Flamenco dancing (Rosa Cisneros), programming weaves on a loom (led by Dr Alex McLean), and live coding music (led by Lucy Cheesman). The researchers will work with participants to explore common patterns behind these forms, starting with the metrical structures of Flamenco dance, and exploring them in coding to make weaves and music based on traditional (yet improvised) Flamenco dance patterns. Flamenco is of Roma heritage, and the project will empower attendees to explore and share their own culture, developing their own approach to creative performance technology.
Phase 2: Offer those young people a paid opportunity to support the open drop-in family workshops we will be running as part of the Sheffield Festivals Showcase in September. These drop-in workshops will be open to all and will be designed for multi-generational involvement.
'The Shape of Sound' Installation and Performance as Part of the Being Human Festival 2021 Coventry Hub
Image Credit: Petra Johnson, from ‘Echoes of Air’ (2016), Shanghai
In July 2021, the Being Human Festival organisers announced that Coventry University Faculty of Arts and Humanities was successful in its bid to be a Festival Hub [Sneak preview of Being Human 2021 - Being Human (beinghumanfestival.org)] for this year’s Being Human Festival that will take place 11th - 20th November 2021.
‘The Shape of Sound’ is an installation, performance, and mini-research project developed by artist-researcher Petra Johnson (PhD) in collaboration with Dr Vipavinee Artpradid (former Postdoctoral Research Fellow, C-DaRE) that was part of the successful bid. C-DaRE colleagues Lily Hayward-Smith, Dr Karen Wood, and C-DaRE PGR Louisa Petts have recently joined the team.
Erasmus+ Key Action 3 RTransform Project Holds Kickoff Meeting
Image Credit: DKM (2021)
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.
Keep an eye out for some more videos and blogs that will appear later in the year.
Although the original Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding for the Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network is coming to an end, we are looking to find ways to make the network sustainable longer term.
We would like to continue to grow, share, and connect with those working in this area but also people new to it too. We will share future news through the C-DaRE newsletter and our social media including Twitter and Facebook.
A special thank you to all who have participated in network activities since May 2019 whether through workshops, webinars, blogs, interviews, and audio/video practices. We would also like to thank the AHRC/UKRI for funding the network, including an additional COVID19 fund which allowed us to extend activities online during the pandemic.
More details here.
Labdays will take place from Autumn 2021 onwards, targeting the following communities: Roma community; Traditional Portuguese dance and culture; Historical dance community (Early Dance Circle [EDC]); Daguerreotype photography community; Slovenian CH community.
The LabDay framework is underpinned by Communicative Methodology (CM), a sociological method that aims to cross social, cultural and linguistic boundaries. This framework enables an open, egalitarian dialogue between researchers and participants; it is a collaboratively-held space where all voices are acknowledged and valued and stakeholders can reflect together on their needs, desires and various forms of participation.
This bottom-up approach will enable cultural communities to themselves become a driver for the WEAVE Toolkit, developing from their bespoke needs concerning the management of their intangible and tangible heritage.
The hope was that each session explored the importance of hip hop and its cultural, social, political and economic value in some capacity. Talking Back opened up online dialogical spaces for people to come together, learn, share, question, reflect, dream and gather different perspectives to current research streams in the field. The event was of interest to people hoping to engage in culturally relevant discussions, students and artists looking for networking opportunities, and anyone seeking to learn more about hip hop culture.
The three-day event included conversations with Dr Alex Mason (University of Sheffield), Otis Mensah, Frieda Frost, Robert Hylton, Dan (Lyrix Organix), Love SSega (UK), Axel Gossiaux (BE), Marius Mates (RO/UK), Adil “Dj KhanFu” Khan (UK), Robin Bodéüs (BE), David Diallo (FR), Dr Monique Charles, Street Factory, and Jade Ward. Each morning there were sharings that included film or a dance workshop.
You can view the playlists here.
Their first event is early September and is part of the Sheffield Showcase festival. The workshop, Algomech drop-in family workshop – dance, music, weave will explore the ‘algorithmic’ arts of weaving, live-coded music and flamenco dancing. This hands-on workshop allows people of all ages to get involved with creating their own patterns in music, dance and weaves.
McLean is an interdisciplinary researcher, live coding musician and technologist, working as post-doctoral researcher as part of the five-year ERC funded PENELOPE project based at the Research Institute of the Deutsches Museum. His work connects contemporary live coding technologies with heritage technologies across textiles and music as “algorithmic pattern”. McLean is the director of AlgoMech Festival and Symposium.
Lucy Cheesman is a sound artist, musician, producer and organiser whose work can be placed within a number of different fields, often blurring the boundary between the visual, the audible and the digital. Lucy is a founder member of SONA (a network supporting women in Sheffield through experimental sound and digital practices) and the Yorkshire Sound Women Network.
The trio work across digital and heritage practices in different ways, and have a unique opportunity to connect different strands of research, working with the local youth to identify commonalities between dance, music, textiles and computer science. All involve discrete mathematics, in the form of culturally grounded patterns.
The project ‘The Shape of Sound’ is a scaled-up installation of elements of the human inner ear using silk threads. It invites visitors to experience the relationship between sound and touch. Movement artists will engage with the installation to explore this relationship. In view of the pandemic, experiencing sound as touch and movement will encourage visitors to question if what they felt through deep listening in times of isolation actually helped them to grasp a deeper understanding of touch within their body, with other humans, and with our environment and larger ecology.
The team is currently in talks with Historic Coventry Trust for a suitable venue. We will provide an update and additional information in the next newsletter.
Image Credit: Petra Johnson, from ‘Poetic Encounters with Algorithm' (2018), London
The European Union has taken action to implement Roma integration strategies and sets of policy measures aimed at improving the situation of Roma and at closing the existing gaps between Roma and the general population.
The consortium held its three-day meeting on 6th - 9th July, and discussed the evidenced-based DKM methodology, transferring the Roma Student Gatherings to Bulgaria, Hungary, the UK, Greece and Spain. Rosa Cisneros is overseeing the project and is tasked with monitoring the quality assurance of the project tracking the impact of the method. Rosa is also ensuring the grassroots Roma women and girls are included at every step of the way and that their lived experiences are contributing to knowledge production.
Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices
Editors Update
We are pleased to announce that there is a new group of principal editors for the journal. Also any new enquiries about the journal should be sent to Jdsp@coventry.ac.uk
Editors:
Marie-Louise Crawley - Coventry University
Natalie Garrett-Brown - University of East London
Lily Hayward-Smith - Coventry University
Eugenia Kim - Independent artist/researcher, HK
JDSP Submissions
We are currently closed for new submissions until January 2022. This is so we can work through the large number of currently submissions we have in process. If you have any questions about these please contact the editors at the email address above.
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 the editors.
Publications
New Essay by Rosa Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley, and Sarah Whatley (C-DaRE)
Mapping a City’s Energy: using digital storytelling to facilitate embodied experiences of urban space and place Rosa Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley, and Sarah Whatley.
This essay 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.
New Research Article by Karen Wood (C-DaRE)
Karen Wood has a new article published in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, entitled UK dance graduates and preparation for freelance working: the contribution of artist-led collectives and dance agencies to the dance ecology.
See here for access.
Karen discusses the role of artist-led networks and their role in the dance ecology, particularly in supporting graduate dance students.
Thank you for reading!
