Dance & Movement Research 2024 #dmr2024

Dance & Movement Research 2024, Monday 15 January to Friday 19 January at the Old Fire Station Arts Centre, Oxford is a week of exploration in dance and movement for creative artists and dance artists organised by Oxford Contact Dance.

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Kinetic sculpture: Clock at Slower than Slow

In June, I attended a workshop entitled ‘Slower than Slow’ with Eva Karczag in Budapest, Hungary. On the second day, Wednesday 28 June we used our feet to contact each other in a sequential production. We created a kinetic sculpture with our moving bodies which I named Clock.

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Kinetic sculpture: Waterfall at Co-Creative Practices in Contact Improvisation

I attended a movement and dance workshop with Nita Little teaching at Wainsgate Chapel, Yorkshire on Friday 3 June – Sunday 5 June. We practiced falling and catching a partner in continuos contact. I named this kinetic sculpture: Waterfall.

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Beginning Contact Improvisation, January 2023

I taught a day workshop on 22 January for people beginning contact improvisation. My good friend and dancer Aundre Goddard attended. During the Covid pandemic we’d created dances outside in the park but now ‘post covid’, I could finally introduce Aundre to my favourite dance practice: contact improvisation.

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Remembering Hugo Demartini, artist

On 10 February 2022, I stood in University Parks, Oxford with 100 small sticks and paper slips between my cupped hands. Raising my hands upward, the sticks and paper were lofted into the air. As they were rising they slowed until, for a moment, they were suspended, neither rising nor falling – a cloud of sticks before me, about to scatter and return earthward in a shower.

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Dance as sculpture | dancing as sculpting | dancer as sculptor

I began to research art manifestos with a view to writing one for dance. Taken together with my recent practice research for the dance ‘Torus 2.3.3’ then I came to the conclusion that dance could be re-contextualised and situated as sculpture.

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One year on: stay home, save lives, do Qi Gong!

It’s about a year since the Coronavirus epidemic began in the UK (March 2020) and there have been two periods in lock-down (stay at home order). During this period, I’ve had a regular practice of Qi Gong (Qigong) – the 18 movement form – and this is what I’ve found in it.

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Lessons from dancing with sticks – the semiotics of stick dancing

When I began teaching and facilitating dancing with sticks, I draw on my experience of contact improvisation but quickly found it wasn’t enough. I needed new concepts. A movement practice with sticks, has its own semiotics (meanings) and its own physics.

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