Carol Brown, Russell Scoones and Dorita Hannah worked with Touch Compass (NZ) on the development of a new work for 2010.  Over a three week period themes of suspension - the pause after an intake of breath; the moment before I start to fall, on hold at the other end of the line -  materialised in choreographic sketches and were shared with an invited audience on December 3rd.  

The alternative video for Blur's single, Crazy Beat. Almost a music video, its danced by a gang of four women in wigs with the band in the background.

ARTISTS TALK: MAKING SPACE SPEAK
Dorita Hannah and Carol Brown have been collaborating on international projects since 2002, developing dance-architectures and site-responsive works which fold audiences into live performance whilst attending to the fractured narratives of place, memory and mythology. Through their work, architectural forms become entwined with corporeal states so that choreography and performance landscape exist as a continuous surface of habitation for performer and audience alike. In combining dance, architecture, sound and screen-based media, Carol and Dorita stitch together different spaces and temporalities, allowing audiences to engage with the work on multiple levels. Making connections between live and mediated bodies and environments, they are concerned to make space speak, shifting audience expectations about how and where one might come to experience a dance and presenting architecture as an inhabiting force within choreography.

In talking with, through and after the works, Tower of Touch (Prague Quadrennial 2003), Her Topia (Athens 2005) and Aarero Stone (New Zealand International Festival 2006) they will discuss their creative and critical practices in making work.

Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah, Critical Path, Sydney 13-15th Sept 09

Working with the unspoken and the unnoticed in the gaps and overlaps between space and time, myth and experience the workshop will use movement, ephemeral objects and texts in creating dance-architectures within public, urban sites. It will assert the mutual performativity of bodies, places and things and the role they play in forming open-ended choreographic narratives.

Strut, Perth 2009 7-12th September

Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah directed a performance laboratory for Strut.  Making the invisible visible: this site-specific research and development project with dancers and designers explored the city of Perth to mine its multiple stories.  Experimentation focused upon relationships between the body, the built and the unbuilt and explored fleeting spatial inhabitations; marking place through retracing embedded histories and installing ephemeral architectures.  http://tonguesofstone.blogspot.com

Contemporary Arts Research University of Chichester - 27 April 2009

Choreographer Carol Brown  and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy discuss The 19th Step, a creative arts and mathematics research collaboration they are engaged in together with Dorothy Ker (composer) and Kate Allen (sculptor). 

In working collaboratively and across disciplines as part of a research driven process are we striving for confluences or marking contradictions?  The presentation will focus upon a creative research process which draws upon multiple modes of inscribing spaces and incarnating mathematics through choreography, composition, design and drawing.

www.the19thstep.co.uk

A dance workshop for Freefall Dance with Carol Brown

Wadham College, Oxford University Sunday 8th February 1200-1600

Working with the body’s unbound potential for movement and exploring the possibilities for textual interventions, choreographies are shaped by inner sensations and outer structures.  How language feels, what it does to us as embodied subjects and the articulation of a primal language discovered through moving in/with space are core themes for this workshop which follows a one-day event on The Body at Wadham College, Oxford University. www.freefalldance.org.uk

On THE  NINETEENTH   STEP of  a basement staircase in a building about to be demolished in downtown Buenos Aires, writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an aleph, a point in space that contains all other points (past, present and future).  From this step we imagine a vast, exhilarating library where all possible languages are sited.  Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy performs alongside an ensemble of outstanding dancers and musicians to create a complex patterning of spaces, layering understandings of time, numbers and relationships within a Borges’ inspired quest for infinity.  

Visit the website for the project www.the19thstep.co.uk

Premiered Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton University 9th April 2008; Performed Boundstone Community College Hall, Lancing, West Sussex 11th April; Laban Studio Theatre London 12th April.

A contemporary dance performance and symposium weekend @ artsdepot  to celebrate International Women’s Day London curated by Ijad Dance Company

Saturday 8th March 8pm A live performance featuring the work of Carol Brown, H2Dance, Yael Flexer/Bedlam, Wendy Houstoun, Rosie Kay, and Joumana Mourad/IJAD Dance Company

Sunday 9th March Symposium 1000-1800

Adroitness sets out to consider different contemporary performance practices asking what kind of forms contemporary performance take and what are the lineages of such work?  Leading practitioners, curators and programmers will contribute including Carol Brown, Kate Castle, Julia Carruthers, Nicky Malloy, Carline Miller, Joe Bates and more.

 Just as our ancestors were supported by wildlife, so we are supported by technology. Welcome to our digital evolution; experience these strange hybrids dancing like they’ve just been made.

A Carol Brown commission for VERVE 08, the graduate performance company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, premiered at the Riley Theatre Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds 22 February 08 and toured the UK, Ireland, Finland, Netherlands visit http://www.article19.co.uk/06/feature/verve_08.php.  Winner of 2008 International Theatre School Festival in Amsterdam Best International Production award.

GLOW was the culmination of the award-winning Radiance project. A site sensitive multi-media event fusing light, movement, video, music and vocals.

With a cast spanning a spectrum of ages, GLOW brought together a dynamic group of over 30 dancers and musicians - both professional and from the local community - to deliver a radiant collaborative spectacle. Performers included: dancers from Carol Brown Dances and StopGAP; Woking College Singers; and musicians from Planet People. Featuring original costumes by fashion designer, Davina Hawthorne, designed and created in collaboration with members of the local community.

This site specific work offered audiences a unique experience of the new canalside gallery. As they journeyed from the gardens to the interior they encountered the unfolding of body stories inspired by the architecture, site and histories of Woking.

GLOW concludes a two year programme RADIANCE, charting the construction period of The Lightbox through a series of performance events and educational programmes.  the process involved a large number of local people and professional artists.  It included workshops in primary schools, secondary schools, with local dancers, weekly costume making workshops, family dance workshops and music workshops.  The artists collaborated with the architect Julia Barfield and researched material for the performance from the historical collections and the aural history project of The Lightbox.

A real-time interactive performance and installation in a constantly evolving virtual sea. 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  runs in cycles during which time visitors are invited to ‘play’ in the installation, watch the performance, then once again inhabit the space.

'an intriguing, ever-changing work of art that leaves an enormous catalogue of images (some of which reminded me of the abstract paintings of Victor Pasmore) imprinted in the memory' GrahamWatts, Read Article

'The effect … is highly emotive and even visceral…. Thomsen's patterns resemble growing organisms, swarming insects, unfurling blossoms, rapidly spreading coral reefs.... Images from nature and the restless, timeless sea….The organic (the live movement) and the toxic (the images generated by Thomsen's computer) share this environment in which nothing is fixed and everything is unstable.' Josephine Leask, Flash Journal, 11-3: Carol Brown Rides the Tech Wave http://www.danceinsider.com/f2006/f1103_2.html

Deep and beneath Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s OCEAN, a multi-media dance installation 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.

London Architectural Biennale. 18 June, 3pm, Siobhan Davies Studios, London.  Dance and Architecture Under the Ribboned Roof Performance Talk by Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen 

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.

A showing of the first stage of development for SeaUnSea as part of Digital Cultures.

Saturday 3 December, Sandfield Theatre, Nottingham

Sandfield Road, Nottingham NG7 1QN

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

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 . 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

 An intimate performance event combining real and virtual spaces created by Carol Brown in collaboration with Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. Three women inhabit a room within which a haunting virtual presence mirrors, distorts and extends their behaviour. Innovative performance technology at the edge of the real.

The Changing Room is a real time interactive performance event intertwining the digital and the visceral in a sublime trio. In their changing room, three women leave behind the territory they know for another place, beyond what they know. A mirror becomes a screen for their mutations, a curtain a technological frontier and their table a platform for the puppetry of the virtual. Through a series of changing viewpoints the audience is lead to encounter the epic within the everyday, as a haunting virtual presence extends, mirrors and distorts the performer's behaviour. Animating the threshold between the virtual and the real, The Changing Room is an intimate exploration of our digital evolution. Designed for both live art and theatre spaces, The Changing Room encourages the shifting viewpoints of a mobile audience.

Ludvig Forum, Aachen, Germany 4-5 June 2004 

Dance Umbrella, Greenwich Dance Agency 4-6 November 2004

A remix of The Changing Room, for the Royal Opera House's Clore Studio Upstairs as part of Snagged and Clored season 29-30 July 2004. www.snagproject.com

between two/zwischen zwei is an homage to the early work of Gertrud Bodenwieser within a musical landscape by Gustav Mahler. Choreography by Carol Brown. Performed by Delphine Gaborit and Leon Baugh of Mano Creates. With Lighting and Video Design by James Leadbitter. Performed at Bonnie Bird Theatre, Laban, London 5-6 February 2004

Carol Brown writes:  "In making this duet I have sought to create a visceral link between the past and the present. As a process this has involved an immersion in the fragmentary traces of Bodenwieser's legacy through photographs, dancer's journals, film and corporeal knowledge. I passed on what I knew about the practices of Gertrud Bodenwieser and her involvement in the expressionist theatre of 1920s and 1930s Vienna to Leon and Delphine. In this way we have created a matrix of interconnections through which the ideas and dramaturgies of Bodenwieser have informed the present. Mahler has been an abiding companion on this journey of re-membering. Beyond this, Between Two/zwischen zwei is as much about what happened in the studio between us as what the vicissitudes of history have bequeathed."

Beyond wreckage, two women find themselves in a surreal landscape of competing desires - a Crevice - where things both float and fall, toward an illusion of progress. Created in Germany and Philadelphia, Crevice is a collaboration between Carol Brown and dance-artists, Niki Cousineau and Gin MacCallum. With music by Jorge Cousineau and Mattias Petzold, and film shot by Alan Mehlbrech. Performed at Dance Boom, Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia 24 January-8 February 2004 

In Electric Fur we have worked with a perspectiveless void to create a series of deep surfaces animated by waves of sensation and memory. Two bodies are infected by shifting states of energy.

choreographer Carol Brown
videographer Abigail Norris
photographer Mattias Ek
sound artist Jerome Soudan [Mimetic]
screen designer and maker Ed King
dancers Jo Fong and Catherine Gardner
Created through an Arts Council of England Capture Award.
Electric Fur is part of the Capture Installations Tour 2004/05

Spawn is a performance event that comprises solo, duet and trio dances. Incorporating live and virtual spaces it takes place within the framework of an interactive architectural environment.

The Touch Tower formed one section of a much larger performance event, Heart of the Senses for the Prague Quadriennale of Theatre Architecture and Scenography 2003. The installation was one of five scaffolding towers each representing a different sense and organised around a long table bound within an undulating timber landscape. As a part of this larger event, choreography and design sought to intertwine the physiological structure of the body, with its history as a material object and cultural artefact. Stitching itself into the landscape, the tower formed a vertiginous panoptic, an anatomical theatre focussing on the body, laid out on a slab or suspended within a viewing slot.  In acknowledging the influence of technology on the senses, it created a mediated sensorium referencing the long distance touch of contemporary medical science and communication technologies as well as the prosthetic extension of the body. The Tower  folded the audience into the work, inviting them to inhabit a range of postures and physical orientations whilst encountering the live  and mediated actions.  Spatially and sensorially these were intended to induce a reorientation of perception, turning the insides out and shifting their relationship from being outside the work as spectators or visitors to becoming participants and themselves subjects within the work. 

Supported by the British Council and Theatre Instistute Prague

http://pq.scape.org.nz

A duet for a man and a woman swallowed by space.

 Commission for Bare Bones, Birmingham Dance Exchange, Birmingham. National Tour March 2003- January 2004

In the reaches of my embodied memory a figure is held in language and in gesture.  She is re-membered in certain movements, and habits of style.  Composed of fragments, of memory, mythology and history, her image is less biography than biomythography, for I never knew her, yet I know her still.  Bodenwieser at the Beach or, Migration and Memory is a performance lecture based on the work and life of Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890-1959) and the corporeal tracings of her legacy found in the teachings of Shona Dunlop MacTavish.

Performed as part of the Centre for Performance Research:  Grounded in Europe Past Masters event, University of Roehampton, 30 Nov-2 Dec 2001.  It was performed again as part of AID Les Archives Internationale de la Danse 1931-51 Research Conference.  Centre National de la Danse, Paris, 1 April, 3.30pm, 2006.

In the shadow of the living light an inert body lies sleeping and a woman’s voice is seen speaking. At the polar opposite of his inertia, her body rides the surfaces of the city detailing night visions of sensual unrest.

Together with the duet, Nerve, Sleeping in Public is part of Carol Brown’s research into the architecture of movement and is supported by an AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts.

"frenetic movements … became an unstoppable, mesmerizing flow." 
Miriam Seidel, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Strata, Sprawl and the video dance, The Idea of Sea commissioned by Group Motion Dance Company, Philadelphia, Premiered Arts Bank, 31 May 2001.

A LIQUID ARCHITECTURAL STATE
70 min installation performance for 5 performers

Sculpting with space, light, movement and metal, Carol Brown and Esther Rolinson create a multi-dimensional environment in which the bodies of the performers and the fabric of the space become an immersive sensory experience.

A dark metallic forest cut with light and animation becomes a visceral machine offering fleeting insights into privately inhabited spaces. The spectator makes a physical journey, composing their own stories from glimpsed moments and fragmented human exchanges. Solid barriers dissolve; flickering images crystallise into human forms; forms coalesce into individual portraits; transient encounters accumulate, allowing relationships to build; movement pathways take on the concentrated patterns of the city; a resonant urban mediascape takes shape.

Original soundscore by Pete M. Wyer. Lighting design by Michael Mannion.

Performers are Carol Brown, Charlotte Derbyshire, James Flynn, Grant Maclay and Mathew Smith.

Performances
Hamburg and Aachen, Germany 12-19 March 2003
Dance Umbrella 8-10 November 2001
World Premiere: 4 October 2000 Brighton Corn Exchange

Because this city is too large and formless to make sense of as a whole,  I have made an irrational short-cut, a track through it. Inside this private city I built a grid of reference points and mapped bits of the body (our bodies) to these points. Each point enshrines a personal moment of the history of touch between us.  This space has been twisted to see how far I can push it.  Nerve was initially researched and developed with the assistance of a Jerwood Award in Choreography in 2000. It was subsequently developed with funding support from London Arts and through Carol Brown's AHRB Research Fellowhip in the Creative and Performing Arts hosted through the dance programme at the University of Surrey Roehampton. Nerve premiered at the British Dance Edition 2002 on 2 February.

Travelling in a lift demands social protocol of the highest order, but what happens when you are ready to crack? A humorous drama of one woman's triumph over suits, bicycle couriers and claustrophobia.  

Commissioned by BBC 2 for DANCE FOR CAMERA 2000. 
Premiered May 2000. Screened BBC2 December 2001.

Two women enact the shapes of memory and feel the burn in this parodic take on music and mimicry.   Performed to  the music of Cole Porter, Schubert and Handel, Carol Brown and Lisa Torun are playful manipulators of the Old Masters.  (10 minutes)

“A remarkable duo...a strange and compelling sight that I expect to remember always” 

The Dominion

Supported by grants from London Arts Board and through a residency at The Place Theatre. 

A baroque-inspired dance commission for 8 women.  This work was initially commissioned by the National School for Contemporary Dance, Copenhagen, Denmark in 1999 and reworked for 12 dancers for EDge - The Postgraduate Performance Group of London Contemporary Dance School in 2003.

As guest choreographer for Scottish Dance Theatre, Carol Brown creates The Glory Box. In this work, she looks at the people who remain after the bride and groom have left their wedding reception. 'Both strangers and intimates are brought together by the occasion; each of them has his or her own story to tell in movement. The work is described as highly physical, cascading and swelling - all to a score specially written by Russell Scoones for voice and instruments.

4 HOUR INSTALLATION PERFORMANCE

created by visual artist ESTHER ROLINSON 
and choreographer CAROL BROWN 
PREMIERED December 1998

shelf life is an installation of new technologies involving collaborations between established artists from digital art (Esther Rolinson), architecture (Stewart Dodd), sound design (Russell Scoones) and choreography (Carol Brown).

In a gallery space, within which an outsized glass shelf suspends, a figure 
exists in a mutating digital environment. 
Her feet cannot touch the ground. 
She is a live-in artefact, hovering in time & space, at the threshold of growth and decay.

shelf life lasts 4 hours each day. Gallery visitors come, stay and leave at their leisure. Comments from recent exhibitions included, "Mesmerizing - and original", "A real experience", and "A piece of depth and quality - I must see it again."

shelf life premiered De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.  Performed North Gallery Brighton University; Horsham Arts Centre; Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham; Poole Arts Centre; Playhouse Theatre, Newcastle; St Pancras Churchyard, Spring Loaded Festival, London; Romaeuropa, Teatro Nazionale, Roma, Italy; Holsovice Brewery; 4 + 4 Days in Motion, International Theater Festival; Romaeuropa, Roma (20-22 October 2000); 4+4 Days in Motion International Theatre Festival, (9 Nov 2000); Contemporary Art Gallery, Zagreb; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vilnius Lithuania.

Between swimming and drowning is floating, a subliminal state.   Drawing on  images of death by drowning, this solo performed by Carol Brown uses fluid physicality, and an original sound score and video by Russell Scoones,  to  trace memories of oceans  and the kiss of life.  (25mins) 

“Quite oustanding dance - steeped in sensuality.”  The Evening Star.

“An intensity of content and movement...communicated in richly woven texts.” Live Art Magazine

“Brown’s work has visual appeal and a depth of content that is almost subliminally transmitted.”  The Evening Star.

Predators or prey?  Taking their cue from the girl power bands of the nineties, Lisa Torun and Carol Brown tell stories  about divas, dogs and getting dirty.   Explicit texts and  riveting movement are accompanied by the live vocals of Lisa Torun in songs by composer Russell Scoones.   (20 minutes)

 'Girl Power with a darker edge'

            Live Art Magazine

Performed by three women their bodies marked markers marking the space with voice, motion and fury.

Body Matters, University of Auckland; University of Surrey; Spring Loaded, The Place Theatre; DanceXchange, Birmingham

The Anatomy of Reason/Mechanics of Fluids/Acts of Becoming formed a trilogy - The Mechanics of Fluids - a full-length solo by Carol Brown.  Originally developed as part of her doctoral research at the University of Surrey, it premiered in 1995 and was subsequently performed at the Lilian Baylis Theatre, London, Melkveg Dance Festival, Amsterdam, Green Mill Festival Melbourne, Purcell Room London and toured throughout New Zealand with a Creative New Zealand grant.

'A breathtaking and inspirational performance, which well deserved the standing ovation it received.'

Otago Daily Times