Carol Brown Dances: Current Projects

Projects 2005-2006

SeaUnSea
Deep and Beneath
Aarero Stone
Radiance 1 Topos
Her Topia

Performance Diary

SeaUnSea

Carol Brown Dances + Escape Design
A Dance Umbrella World Premiere

SeaUnSea
Photo by Anders Jensen

SeaUnSea, a collaboration between choreographer Carol Brown and architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, is a serenely beautiful interactive installation for performers and audience in a constantly evolving visual field.

Set under the wave-like ceiling of the Siobhan Davies Studio, the movements of audience and performers impact on the environment becoming entangled in a synthetic seascape. Captured within these fleeting forms the performers play and explore, attracting, repulsing and entwining their actions within the evolving patterns of a swirling hypnotic sea. The event will run in cycles during which time visitors are invited to ‘play’ in the installation, watch the performance, then once again inhabit the space.

SeaUnSea is an absorbing and immersive experience of luscious imagery, sounds and movement.

Visitors are requested to wear dark and comfortable clothing to fully appreciate the installation experience.

Thu 12 and Fri 13 October, 8pm
Sat 14 October, 3pm, 5.30pm & 8pm
Sunday 15 October, 3pm & 5.30pm

Siobhan Davies Studios
Tickets £10 (£8 concs)
Limited capacity, advance purchase strongly recommended.

Dance Umbrella Ticket Line: 0870 730 1407
Tickets only available through Dance Umbrella Ticket Line. Tickets only available from venue on the day of performance one hour prior to the start of each showing. For further information www.danceumbrella.co.uk

Deep and beneath

Carol Brown will be Artistic Director for Deep & Beneath: A Roundhouse Studios in partnership with Dance Umbrella Event

Deep & Beneath will be open to audiences for Merce Cunningham’s OCEAN as part of Dance Umbrella at the Roundhouse Studios, London September, 21-24th 2006.

Deep and beneath Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s OCEAN, a multi-media dance installation will be created for the HUB. Culminating out of the Summer Workshop programme at the Roundhouse (14-18 August 06) and taking its inspiration from the creative processes used in making OCEAN, deep and beneath combines dance, poetry, moving image and sound in a multi media event.

Responding to the concept of OCEAN as something vast, immersive and deep, the installation features the movements, words and musics of local young people as they ‘swim’ within the ocean of digital communications and move within urban tides of action.

Workshop participants generate dance, music, text and imagery through interactions with technology pushing the expressive languages of the body

Participants will gain insights into the working practices and methods of Merce Cunningham Dance Company and use software programmes like poser and Life Forms to augment their experience of dancing.

Workshop for young people (13-19 years) Monday 14 August – Friday 18 August 2006, Roundhouse Studios
Live Installation Thursday 21 September – Sunday 24 September 2006
The Hub
The ROUNDHOUSE
100A Chalk Farm Road
London NW1 8EH

For further information visit www.roundhouse.org.uk

Aarero Stone

Aarereo Stone: Two Solos in a Performance Landscape

A New Zealand International Arts Festival Commission
Saturday 4 - Wednesday 8 March 2006
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand
Choreography and Performance: Carol Brown and Charles Koroneho
Design: Dorita Hannah
Music: Russell Scoones and Charles Koroneho

Aarero Stone is an enduring lament for the living inscribed with love. How do we care for the strangely familiar and mourn the distant dead? Tongues of Stone is hard talk, and the stone tongue is the speaking landscape. Colin McMahon referred to New Zealand as “a landscape with too few lovers”. How do we recover romance in such a place? Talking in forgotten languages with their remote rites. Aarero Stone performs an archaeology of buried voices, resonating from two cosmologies, Maori and European. Loosening the tongue of frozen speech, geology becomes mythology: Sibyl’s voice endures as her body disappears within a cave, Niobe turns to stone in mourning for her dead children, the women of Belstone are petrified as punishment for dancing on the Sabbath. Cracking open the stone tongue with a resounding adze: the fallen soldier becomes memorialised in a granite tomb, the Maori warrior dances for the dead, the trained performer mourns the loss of his cultural body. Fed by rivers of stories, one world leaks into another. Rather than a place of too few lovers we find the lovers are many, distant and near.

AAreroe Stone Copyright Robert Catto
Image © Robert Catto www.catto.co.nz All rights reserved.

Radiance 1 Topos

Woking Dance Festival and Lightbox
21st September 2005, 1600, 1915, Lightbox Building Site, Woking, UK

A site sensitive event which marked the space and celebrated the start of the construction of the new Lightbox (formerly Woking Galleries). Carol Brown worked with an inter-generational cast of 23 performers and a live string ensemble to create a stone foundation ceremony, marking the building site with light, voice and movement.

Topos was performed to an audience of over 200 people against a backdrop of construction machinery and on the site of the new art gallery. It incorporated state-of-the-art wearable lighting designed especially for the performance by Ulli Oberlack. The piece was performed by children from the New Monument School in Maybury, the DeVyne Dancers from The Vyne Community Centre in Knaphill and Carol Brown Dances. Musicians from Planet People (Lockwood Day Centre) performed live and recorded music under the direction of Russell Scoones.

With support from ACE Arts Plus Award
For further information visit www.thelightbox.org.uk
See news for details of Arts Plus Award and Future Projects for information about performance for the opening of the Lightbox as part of Woking Dance Festival in 2007

Radiance 1 Topos

Photo by Kim Lamthiotis

Her Topia
A Dance Architecture Event for The Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance Research, Kopanos, Athens, Greece, 7-8 October 2005

Inspired by the unique building at Kopanos designed by Isadora and Raymond Duncan as a utopic place for dancing, Her Topia is a specially commissioned work for the Centre. Isadora Duncan created the distinction of dance as an art form for the 20th century and asserted the freedom of a woman dancing. What does it mean to be a liberated woman dancing in the 21st century?

Choreographer, Carol Brown and Designer, Dorita Hannah, explode concepts of freedom and fashion as seventeen women performers go liberty hunting. Weaving their audience through the inside and outside of this unique building the performers create a journey through ancient and contemporary images. Dancing their body stories into the stones of this historic place with precise abandonment, and projecting these dances out into the cityscape of Athens through multiple reflections, using light, video and mirrors, the performers create a heterotopia, a place of other spaces.

Her Topia brings together an international team of outstanding collaborators and is made possible by a grant from the British Council.

Where: Duncan Dance Research Center, 34 Chrysafis & Dikearchou Street, Vyronas, 16 232 Athens

Her Topia