Carol Brown Dances: Carol Brown Writes

Carol Brown Writes

21.09.00

Photo: Carol Brown Firstly a huge thank you to Raewyn Whyte of URL Internet Consultants and Gabriella Kosztolányi for the support of this site and its construction and to Russell Scoones for its planning and organisation. I hope you agree they have done a fabulous job with it. I now look forward to its dissemination to the out there and in here world.

Though I live in London I travel widely in pursuit of the dance byte/bite, that contagion of completion, when the riding through space, the articulation of movement forms a whole sensation, something that can be tasted. Some distillation of these moments of performance is, I hope entrusted to this site and now disseminated through the ether-net. Thank you Raewyn, though we live on opposite sides of the world this is a marvellous cross hemispherical way of bridging zones of interactivity: between Auckland and London; live performance and the World Wide Web; between you and me.

Right now I am in the final stages of making Machine for Living. I am exhausted, elated, excited, scared, I am fixed on its moment of performance, I am awaiting its arrival. Soon, its coming....

It premieres in Brighton on Wednesday 4th October. After over a years research and planning, this work is finally coming together, I can't believe it. Le Corbusier and R.D. Laing make for strange and erratic bedfellows. It is their writings and ideas about spaces of habitation and models of human interaction, that have influenced the project. After years of working within conventional theatrical spaces, I wanted the challenge of testing environments. In this work, the visual artist Esther Rolinson has created a metallic forest, thirteen 5m tall panels of perforated steel, hang in the space, we the performers weave, butt up against, navigate and become ensnared by these forms, they are our habitat for the duration of the performance. The spectator is invited to view the work from all directions. They do the mixing.

We are planning to bring this project to London in Spring 2001 and hope to tour it throughout the UK in Autumn 2001. Alongside the forthcoming performances of Machine for Living, we are running two professional workshops for dance artists and visual artists, one in Greenwich and one in Brighton. Then there is a performance lecture, in which I hope to embody the stages of development of the Machine Dance, from Bauhaus to Brown.

Without pause for breath we are then off to Rome for the RomaEuropa Festival and performing Shelf Life, in the National Theatre from 19-21 October, a performance in Prague in a converted brewery follows on November 9th as part of the site specific and installation performance festival 4x4. I travel from Prague to Lubin in Poland to begin a tour of three Polish cities, together with Lisa Torun, Carol Brown Dances will be performing, Ocean Skin, Flesh.txt and Like a House on Fire. This will be an exciting opportunity to revive three theatre dance works, not seen since performances in Philadelphia in the Spring. Unlike the installation performance events, we will be travelling light, just ourselves and our microphones.

I am going to New Zealand late November and will be investigating sites and opportunities for my installation performance events with a view to the future. Whatever that may be.

Email: carol@cranium.demon.co.uk

Other Entries: 01.07.03 | 22.11.02 | 16.05.02 | 18.09.01 | 29.01.01 | 21.09.00