About Carol Brown Dances

Carol Brown Dances is a contemporary dance company specialising in the creation of collaborative performance events. Through a visceral poetics arising from the fugitive knowledge of the body, Carol Brown Dances strives to open alternative perspectives and engage audiences in imaginative journeys. The work of the company focuses upon solos and group works for theatre, installation, and site-responsive events. The choreography of Carol Brown is renowned for its conversations with artists in other art forms and collaborations that challenge ideas about the spaces of/for dance. The work is research-driven and develops through an ongoing process of investigation into bodies, their histories and inventions, and how they touch and are touched by the environments we inhabit, both technological and actual. Recent collaborations have created a strongly visual performance language through an emphasis upon architecture, digital interaction and installation. Many of these works offer audiences a choice about how to experience the work through the absence of fixed seating.

The company was formed in London in 1996 with the composer Russell Scoones. Following a residency at the Place Theatre in 1997-98 Carol Brown Dances has had an international presence through residencies, touring, commissions and workshops.

Carol Brown Choreographer | Artistic Director

Carol Brown is an award-winning choreographer of contemporary dance, a writer, teacher and Artistic Director of Carol Brown Dances. Her work is research-led and collaborative; it evolves through intense dialogue and experimentation, in particular with artists and scholars from architecture, music, visual arts and literature. A New Zealander, Carol began her dance training with former Bodenwieser dancer, Shona Dunlop MacTavish in Dunedin and continued her training in New York and London after completing a history honours degree. She has an MA(dist) and a PhD in Dance from the University of Surrey, England. The latter, completed in 1995, was one of the first practice-based PhDs in the UK.

In 1997 Carol was made Associate Artist and in 1999 the first woman Choreographer in Residence at the Place Theatre in London. Since this time, she has received numerous awards including, a Jerwood Award for Choreography, an AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts and a NESTA Dream Time. In 2003 Carol was awarded the Ludwig Forum International Prize for Innovation for The Changing Room.

Carol’s choreography opens questions through exploring relationships between spaces and bodies in diverse situations. A process-led focus upon how bodies move with given constraints, often spatially determined, generates a somatic language which is shaped, refined and contested through emergent choreographic scores. Her productions, through Carol Brown Dances have been presented throughout the world including at the Hermitage Theatre (St Petersburg); Bank Theatre (Philadelphia); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (Australia); National Theatre (Rome); Te Papa Soundings Theatre (Wellington, New Zealand); Purcell Room (South Bank London); National Theatre of Bulgaria (Sofia); Centre National de la Danse (Paris); Birmingham Hippodrome; Ludwig Forum (Aachen); and the Place Theatre (London).

Together with frequent collaborator Dorita Hannah, (Touch Tower, Her Topia and Aarero Stone) Carol is currently developing large-scale place sensitive works, stimulating the civic life of the city with dancing.

Russell Scoones Composer & Musician

Russell was born in Dunedin, New Zealand. He began playing bass, singing and writing songs for rock bands in the mid 1970's and by the 1980's he was touring Australia with Landing Party and The Modules, as well as performing with New Zealand actor and performance poet Peter Tait in Not Dead Yet.

In 1987 he returned to Dunedin to study composition with Antony Ritchie at the University of Otago and classical guitar with Sue Court. He composed the song cycle Poems to Eat based on the Tanka poems of Ishikawa Takuboku, which toured New Zealand theatres in 1990. He also composed, performed and toured New Zealand with percussion duo Smith Vs Smith. His early dance collaborations began at this time with Carol Brown, Bronwyn Judge and Shona Dunlop MacTavish. In 1991 he was employed to help establish Artsenta, an arts workshop in Dunedin for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Russell travelled to England on a Creative NZ study grant in 1992 to complete a diploma in Arts Administration. In 1996 he co-foundered Carol Brown Dances and collaborated with Carol on many dance pieces including Ocean Skin, Flesh Txt, Like A House On Fire and the BBC2 dance film The Lift, as well as the installation work Shelf Life and Nerve. These performances have toured internationally throughout Europe, Scandinavia, USA and New Zealand.

Until June 2007 Russell has been artistic director of Planet People, a collection of musicians and composers with learning disabilities based in Surrey. Planet People’s extraordinary dance film Our Moving World was recently screened at the 7th London Disability Film Festival at London’s National Film Theatre. Planet People recently completed the music composition for GLOW, a dance performance to celebrate the opening of The Lightbox Art Galleryin Woking UK.

Russell currently lives between Auckland, NZ and London where he is bringing up his young son, while continuing to write songs and study for an MA in Music Therapy at the University of Roehampton.

Dorita Hannah Architect / Scenographer

Dorita Hannah is an architect, scenographer and Professor of Design at Massey University's College of Creative Arts, where she directs the Spatial Design and Postgraduate programs. As an architect and scenographer her focus is on the intersection between space and performance, which she explores through her practice, teaching and research. This allows her to operate as an interdisciplinarian on a variety of projects and research interests, ranging from design for performance through to buildings, exhibitions, fashion and installation. She has directed performance design workshops in New Zealand, Europe and the USA and has exhibited her design-work internationally, including at the Prague Quadrennial (1995 & 1999) and the World Stage Design Exhibition (Toronto, 2005). In 2003 she formulated the Heart of PQ, a site-specific installation exhibiting the senses in performance. This intercultural project, which gained awards and was widely published, established an ongoing collaboration with Carol Brown. Together they have run international workshops and formulated projects that allow their mutual interest in movement and architecture to be developed and played out. These projects include Her Topia: a dance-architecture event (Athens, 2005) and Aarero Stone; two solos in a performance landscape (Wellington, 2006), as well as the proposed Tongues of Stone (Perth, 2010). In 2008 Dr Hannah co-edited an anthology on Performance Design (with Olav Harslof) and a themed issue for the JAE Journal on Performance/Architecture (with Omar Khan). She is currently on the editorial board of World Scenography and is international commissioner for the Theatre Architecture section in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. Email: d.m.hannah@massey.ac.nz

Reviews

‘stunning…strange and thrilling’

Ann Williams on the changing room

‘What Hannah and Brown present in the moving images and moments of Aarero Stone,is a lamentation on a universal scale: one where we find perspective on our troubles by identifying with the suffering of ‘the other’’

Sam Trubridge 'Beyond the Veil' Theatre Forum, Winter/Spring2007, Issue 30, pp3-10.

‘Carol Brown was spellbinding in Aarero Stone where she examined themes of lamentation and myth. In an austere pageant of dance poetry, Brown told stories of women: tragic, bold and clandestine.’

Francesca Horsley on aarero stone The Listener, December 30-January 5 2007.

‘The work which really stood out for me in Dance Umbrella for its boldness and imagination was "The Changing Room," … the three women performers are like pioneers on the verge of discovering a brave new world.’

Josephine Leask The Changing Room

'Her virtuosity is one that revels in the detail of execution... Subtle brilliance.'

Shelf Life Dance Now

‘Carol Brown defines for me what it means to be an innovative artist, once again she has collaborated with different complex and artistic groups to create astonishing work.’

Irene Ludwig on The Changing Room Ludwig Forum

A glass shelf is currently suspended 3 meters above the ground via an elegant construction of chrome stilts, and for three-and-a-half hours each evening, dancer and choreographer Carol Brown is performing her solo Shelf Life. The installation was created with visual artist Esther Rolinson and began as a dialogue between movement and architecture. But the project evolved a further cluster of metaphors - of things being left on shelves, of the slow, inexorable process of age and decay - and these are now a central part of the performance. Brown is an assertive, even glamorous, performer, confidently angling her strong body through different planes and levels as she works within the limits of her stage. But she also operates from an unusually calm focus, so even as we register the ambitious structures of her choreography we're also caught by the sense of the slow, steady heartbeat grounding all her moves. As traffic noise snarled up with the serene washes of Russell Skoon's sound score, it was as if we could hear the sound of two conflicting human rhythms - the ragged palpitations of city life and the internal pulse dramatised by Brown's body. As ordinary people were briefly snagged into watching the show - passing by on buses or looking down from offices - Brown's meditative dance, isolated on her shelf, seemed an icon of contemplation, a little monto mori. It was the neatest justification of live art - life, simply, being turned into art.

Judith Mackrell A Meditation on Glazing, St Pancras Church, London The Guardian, Friday June 2 2000

Carol Brown in her solo season, The Mechanics of Fluids, gives a riveting perfomrnace of a searing choreography such as not been seen here since Mary Fulkerson from Dartington Colelge of Arts danced out her eight-hour autobiography at the National Art Gallery in the late 1970s.

Brown is back in New Zealand after several years at the University of Surrey on a doctotral studies programme but there is nothing academic about her performance. She is the former student of the remarkable Shona Dunlop MacTavish in Dunedin, in her turn a student of and dancer with the celebrated Gertrud Bodenwieser. Both of these dance greats would, I think, be very pleased with their progeny. Russell Scoones collaborates with a fully supportive sound score. Philippa Wickhams lighting is at once simple and sophisticated. All aspects of the staging and programme notes are admirably well-judged.

If you like your art labelled (which I do not) you might call is 'post post-modern'. What is for sure is that the movement vocabulary, at times quirky and esoteric, is thoroughly inventive and there is plenty of if. No borrowed conventions here. Brown has all the authority of a choreographer/dancer who knows exactly what she can do, and also has the courage to push herself further into a performance commitment that might be alarming if you did not feel confidence in her command.

Brown's themes are of performer versus audience, or language versus choreography, of what to dance about, images of self and body, and whether Plato had ideas that would translate fruitfully into choreography. She takes off her dress: "I'm miming philosophy" she chants. Every move is measured and planned with maximum accuracy and clarity. She produces a doll from a brief-case: "This is my brainchild" but this kind of description does nothing to convey to you the powerful athleticism and secure grounding of her movement.

The mesmerising beauty of the nude figure bathed in light would have swifly shut Plato up. And finally there is a sustained sequence of whirling movement that puts the audience on to a plane where, on the way home, the shining moon and bright stars in the clear Wellington night sky seem closer than the last time you looked.

Jennifer Shennan Beautiful enough to shut Plato up The Evening Post, November 9, 1995

A body on a glass shelf, slides, melts, subsides, re-emerges, crawls, rises to the vertical, then pours down through space. Carol Brown, somewhere between virtual body and live presence is activator of this installation with its ambient environment created by digital imaging and soundscore. She plays with the notion of being 'on the shelf', with its connotations of waiting, and being past the sell by date. The soft malleable surfaces of her body merge with the hard smooth glass surface, while projected digital figures, created by Esther Rolinson move as virtual bodies, shadowy extensions of Brown - what we see is a dance of intermingling live and virtual presences. For a duration of four hours she departs but never arrives, in a series of constant becomings. Suspended in space her substantial body and its fleeting presences draw attention to the architecture of the space. There is an aura of serenity from the shelf, as though it were resting in the eye of a storm, a haven from the chaotic world beyond it.

The audience who inhabit the installation are lulled and mesmerized, some sit or lie on the floor, some sleep caccooned from the outside world, guided towards the virtual world by this reassuring material body.

Josephine Leask Shelf LIfe Live Art Magazine, May 1999