Carol Brown Dances: Previous News

Workshop Presentation
PARIP 2005 International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005, Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire. Re-conceiving embodiment: the dance-architecture of Spawn

CAROL BROWN AND METTE RAMSGARD THOMSEN presented a workshop based on their research for Spawn. Spawn is an ongoing performance research project which aims to design and realise the staging of real and virtual presences through embodied interfaces or mixed reality environments. The practices of dance, architecture and computer science combine in Spawn to question the limits of the body and its virtual representation, fusing the thinking of embodiment and space with the design of new technologies for the interfacing and display of digital environments. Partipants had an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the interactive play of the system through demonstration, inhabitation and discussion.

Choreodrome: An experimental journey
11-15 July Founders Studio, The Place, 2005

Choreographer Carol Brown will be working in the studio with performance artist, Charles Koroneho from New Zealand, and dancer Delphine Gaborit. The body as a medium for the mythic, the palpably real and the spectral is the central focus. The research explores metamorphoses between embodied and disembodied states and including the transdimensional possibilities of video manipulation technology through Isadora software. Inspired by the writings of Marina Warner amongst others, this open-ended journey begins from the premise of movement memories as mnemonic markers of other places and times. In this way it experiments with a choreographic method which makes connections between the present and the distant, the personal and the global through stories, states of energy, props and live video projection. Crossing between perceptions of geology and globality the journey rearranges the order and timing of things as it creates multiple pathways for action and invention.

The Magdalena Project "The Articulate Practitioner - Articulating Practice"
21 July 2005 1130-1300 University of Aberystwyth, Wales
I Will be Us or Nothing: An experimental journey in Dream Time
Choreographer Carol Brown re-stages a series of encounters through texts, images and dances, articulating her research into metamorphoses, morphogenesis and transdimensional spaces, during a year long NESTA Dream Time.

1000-1300 Workshop by Carol Brown for Professional Dancers
Padatik, Kolkata, India

Dancetalk: Dancing in the Mediascape, Padatik, Kolkata, India
Supported by NESTA and British Council
1830-2000

Carol Brown will use examples from research undertaken during her NESTA Dream Time to articulate some of the challenges dancers and choreographers face as they engage with an increasingly globalised and mediatised world. How is the live presence of the dancer reconceived when performing with digital bodies? What kinds of relationships between performer and audience are possible when we work with new media? How might dance and new technologies open new methods for transcultural dialogues?

Darpana Ensemble Residency, 19 August - 2 September 2005.
Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen will be resident artists with Darpana ensemble in Ahmedabad, Gjurarat. They will be working with the company dancers and musicians on the creation a new work using the Spawn embodied interface to create a new interactive dance performance. Through collaboration with a local programmer they will be manipulating the existing programme and visualisation of the interface adapting it to the different aesthetics and creative languages of this renowned Gujurat based company directed by Mallika Sarabhai.

Dance Advance Workshop
Philadelphia, USA 17-21 October 2005.
Carol Brown will lead a professional development workshop for Choreographers in Philadelphia, USA. The workshop will focus on uses of space, its shaping and transforming through dance and the body as a many-timed archive of articulations.

New Commission: RADIANCE
Carol Brown is being commissioned by Woking Galleries and Woking Dance Festival through an Arts Plus public art prize to create a series of works which respond to the site and architecture of Woking's new heritage and arts centre, Woking Galleries.

This is an exciting collaboration which will involves collaboration with light artist, Peter Freeman, who is creating a 34 metre long light installation and architect Julia Barfield the creator of the London Eye and who is the architect of the new building. Carol Brown's work for Radiance will culminate in a large-scale performance as part of its opening celebrations in 2007. The common inspiration for the work has been the role of light, movement and memory in defining how we experience architectural spaces within cultural buildings.

The prize was awarded by Art Plus, a prestigious public art scheme run by Arts Council England, South East and SEEDA (South East England Development Agency) and supported by Berkeley Homes and Land Securities.
For more information visit http://www.wokingdancefestival.co.uk/radiance.htm

Sound collaborator for Carol Brown Dances, Jerome Soudan [Mimetic] has released The Changing Room CD and a special limited edition box CD of The Changing Room + Electric Fur through Hands Productions. To listen to the musics from these events is to create a powerful evocation of the atmospheres of the works without the visual references. The CD of The Changing Room includes some specially recorded additional sounds and music including the voice of Carol Brown recorded by Russell Scoones.

MIMETIC DANCING
The Changing Room + Electric Fur
CD + MCD special limited box
The Changing Room CD
http://www.handsproductions.com/

New Publication
Arteries and Avatars in Choreographic Encounters Volume 2 (ed) Mary Brady. Institute for Choreography and Dance (icd), 2004, pp 39-51.

Choreographic Encounters is a series of occasional journals published by the Institute for Choreography and Dance (icd). Volume 2 discusses the theme 'dance and identity' and features contributions by choreographers Carol Brown (U.K.), Omar Barghouti (Palestine), Steve Batts (Northern Ireland), Faustin Linyekula (Dem. Rep. Congo), Fearghus Ó Conchúir (Ireland), Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe (South Africa) and Alexander Baervoets (Belgium). Photographer Derek Speirs, poet Tom McCarthy and graphic designer Nigel Williams contribute to the discussion via their own artforms.
Choreographic Encounters Volume 2 is available from major book distributors, specialist bookshops and directly from icd.
http://www.instchordance.com/

Dream Time
Carol Brown has been awarded a Dream Time Fellowship which she will take up from June 2004. Nesta Dream Time Fellowships are made to leading individuals working in any area of technology/engineering, science or the arts. The awards are designed to give exceptional achievers, with at least ten years experience in their field, structured time away from their work to pursue ideas and activities which will benefit both themselves and their sector.

The award of £32,000 will provide Carol with the resources and time for a programme of private research - looking into the interconnections between diverse spaces through choreography and the place of the dancer within actual and virtual environments.

August 2004
Press Release
New Zealand Choreographer Making Fresh Moves in Europe.

In brief
New Zealand born choreographer Carol Brown is a recipient of two prestigious awards in Europe: The UK’s NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) Dream Time Award and the Ludwig Forum International Art Prize for Innovation.

NESTA’s Dream Time is awarded to exceptional individuals to innovate and explore new ideas through a period of intense personal development. The Ludwig Forum Prize acknowledges Carol’s ground-breaking work in the field of dance through her recent collaborations with architects, filmmakers, and digital artists. Previous awardees include Laurie Anderson and next year the award will go to Peter Gabriel.

Dancer and choreographer Carol Brown will be using the Awards to further develop her research into dance, emerging technologies and cultural perceptions of space. She will be visiting New Zealand as part of her research and to prepare for a proposed tour in 2005.

Profile
Carol Brown Dances last tour of New Zealand in 1999 achieved rave reviews and standing ovations. The company has since gone on to achieve international success and recognition. Dunedin-born dancer and choreographer Carol is renowned for her cross-art form collaborations and innovative performance research. This gives her a unique ‘dual vision’ she says: “I see theatre space as both a physical stage for the meeting of bodies and a site for the intersection of bodies of thought.”

Her dances have been sited at venues as diverse as the external wall of St Pancras Church, in London, the Industrial Palace in Prague, and St Petersburg’s Hermitage Theatre. Most recently her interactive dance performance, The Changing Room, premiered at the Ludwig Forum in Germany to critical acclaim.

Spawning innovative choreography
Together with architect Mette Thomson Ramsgard and computer scientist Professor Bernard Buxton, Carol developed an interactive system, Spawn to create The Changing Room.

Spawn enables a virtual avatar to be kinetically modelled by the actions of a dancer. “In combining the organic properties of the human being with the inorganic data of the computed, we created a hybrid form suitable for a range of artistic and scientific outputs.”

As part of Dream Time, Carol will continue this work, along with a challenging project aimed at developing transcultural awareness. As a dancer on tour, she is accustomed to travelling the world, but has always been keen to get a sense of the ‘space’ in which she is working. She says: “Through Dream Time, I want to find new ways of working that propose different kinds of relationships between the virtual and the real, and between what is near and what is distant.”

Moving Between Hemispheres
Carol Brown is a history honours graduate from the University of Otago. She was for many years a pupil of dance doyenne, Shona Dunlop MacTavish. She continued her education in the UK and in 1995 received one of the first doctorates in practice-based dance research from the University of Surrey. In 1997 she was an associate artist and then in 1998, choreographer in residence at The Place Theatre, London. Together with Dunedin born musician, Russell Scoones, she formed Carol Brown Dances in 1996. Carol has received numerous awards including: Jerwood Award for Choreography (1999), an AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts (2001), and an ACE Capture 2 Award (2002). She has received support from Creative New Zealand, Arts Council England and the British Council for her work. Carol Brown Dances have presented at numerous festivals including Dance Umbrella, London; Sobre Saltos, Columbia; Roma Europa, Italy; Full Moon Festival, Finland; British Dance Edition; Philadelphia Fringe Festival; Tanz Mediale, Germany; the Prague Quadrenniale; and Monaco Dance Forum, France. Commissions have been for the rock band Blur (Crazy Beats), Scottish Dance Theatre, EDge, Group Motion and Subcircle (USA) and Bare Bones.

ROOM, 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 or www.royaloperhouse.org

SIGGRAPH Sketches 2004 Los Angeles, 8-12 August. Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen are presenting their research and development of the embodied interface, Spawn. www.siggraph.org/

PROFound Ephemeral Architectures of Performance Workshop. A workshop led by Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah for Centre for Performance Research, Summer Shift, Aberystwyth, Wales,19-25 June. www.thecpr.org.uk Ephemeral Architecture, considered as a resistant and elusive force, highlights the shifting relations between body and self through explorations of site. If certain bodily practices enhance awareness of the body-in-flux what would it mean to locate this understanding within spaces that are also in flux?

Premier of a new duet for Mano Creates, Between Two/Zweishcen Zwei. An homage to Gertrud Bodenwieser within a musical landscape by Gustav Mahler.
Opus 1
Thursday 5 and Friday 6 February 2004 7.30pm
The Laban Theatre, Deptford, London.

Tanzmediale
German Premier of Electric Fur
tanzmedial: Installationen, Fotografien, Filme
An Exhibition at SK Stiftung Kultur
Room 1 + 2, Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln
9 December 2003 to 1 February 2004. www.sk-kultur.de/videotanz

a one day symposium on dance research practices
new alignments and emergent forms

13 December 2003 , 0930-1830, Froebel College , Roehampton University of Surrey. Curated by Carol Brown and Anna Pakes

Release of article by Carol Brown, Sight Lines/Fault Lines: Overwriting Perspectives. In, Surface Tension: Problematics of Site Edited by Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle, CD selection by Stephen Vitiello Design by Louise Sandhaus. Published by Errant Bodies Press with Ground Fault Recordings ISBN 0-9655570-4-9 $25.00. Available through www.amazon.com.

One Off Site Specific Performance event at Bloomberg, Finsbury Square, London 27 November 2003.

Maybe. A duet made for Bare Bones London Premier 15-17 January 2004, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, London.

dance-architecture workshop at the Isadora Duncan Centre for Dance in Athens September 30-October 5.

Perforum University College Cork , Performance Lecture: Philosophy in the Flesh. 22 October 2003.

Crazy Beat, the alternative Video for Blur's single directed by John Hardwick and Choreographed by Carol Brown, is being broadcast on Channel Four 26 July 2003 at 7.30pm as part of the second programme of the Dance 4 series.

The dance film Carol choreographed with director John Hardwick for the British band Blur will be televised on Channel 4 in late July. Transmission date to be confirmed.

Carol will spend two weeks in Germany with the Philadelphia-based dancer-choreographers, Gin MacAllum and Nikki Cousineau as well as sound artist, Jorge Cousineau and film-maker, Alan Mehlbrech. They will be in residence at Fabrik in Potsdam and Theatre Research International, Brollin. These residencies will be followed by work in Philadelphia assisting with the direction and dramaturgy of Crevice and performing the solo, Sleeping in Public.

Carol, Grant and Austin will travel to Finland and the Full Moon Festival in late July. Carol will give a talk on her work and perform the duet Nerve with Grant.

Encouraged by extremely positive feedback following the work in progress showings, the company is now fund-raising for the next period of development for the project, Spawn.

Carol has been invited to present a keynote address to the Practice as Research in Performance Conference in Bristol.

Dancer, Grant McLay is getting married as is Esther Rolinson. Mattias Ek has sadly moved to Sweden and continues long distance to work with Carol on various photographic projects and documents.

Early in 2003 Carol will be working on her 2001 revised production Machine for Living, preparing for a tour which will take in Aachen on 15th March and Düsseldorf on 18th and 19th March, dates are also to be confirmed with DanceXchange, Birmingham and Roehampton University of Surrey to coincide with the University’s Civic Centre conference in April.

Carol is also in demand as a choreographer for other companies this spring with invitations to work with and choreograph for Edge dance company, London and Bares Bones Dance Company, Birmingham. In March Carol will be in residence at the Institute for Contemporary and Dance in Cork, Ireland leading workshops and lectures as well as focussing on her movement research.

Following the enthusiastic reception for Electric Fur (an Arts Council of England CAPTURE film made by Carol as choreographer with videographer Abigail Norris and photographer Mattias Ek) the film will continue to tour in 2003 to Argentina and Cologne.

Carol will present her new production, Spawn at Roehampton University of Surrey on 14th May. Spawn is a cross-disciplinary collaboration with the architect Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen to create an ecology of perception in which new models of performance can be explored. Carol and Mette are researching the potential for embodying spaces within a mixed reality environment with a view to realising a fluid space of multiple becomings.

Carol will be based in Prague throughout June, where she is participating in the 'Heart of PQ', an exhibition that focuses on the senses in performance through a sceno-architecture as part of the Prague Quadrenniale June 14-29 2003. It proposes to exhibit performance as a "lived experience" where theatrical space is presented, discovered, and shared by practitioners and visitors alike. The Tower of Touch curated by Carol Brown as part of the exhibition, acknowledges the influence of technology on the senses. It challenges the sensory nature of touch through a primarily visual regime where touch is scopic.

Choreography of the Image: Landscape, movement and memory

Carol and Mattias in ferns

Choreography of the Image: Landscape, movement and memory
A creative research project for dance artists and photographers sited on the Otago Peninsula
Dates: 12-17 November 2002 at University of Otago dance studio and the Otago Peninsula

Choreographer Carol Brown and photographer Mattias Ek will draw on their extensive experience as collaborators to create the conditions in which live presence and photography can be brought into meaningful dialogue. This location-specific workshop will involve movement between the studio environment and a series of unique locations on the Otago peninsula. Participating artists will work over a six day period on movement improvisations, site investigations and practical explorations towards the development of a series of still and moving images.

This work will be informed by new media applications for dance and photography. It will focus on movement, listening and invention, body/site relations, dialogues between camera and dancer, photographic techniques and performance presence.

The workshop is aimed at experienced practitioners and is a unique opportunity for professional development in the areas of collaboration and presentation.

Workshop Fees: $175 (incl. GST) for DANZCARD holders and $225 (incl. GST) for non-DANZCARD holders.
Enrolments close 20 September 2002 - INQUIRIES should be sent to Philip Tremewan - email: philipt@danz.org.nz, phone: 04 801 9885, fax: 04 801 9883

Supported by the British Council and by DANZ � the national arts educational and service agency for dance - which receives major funding from Creative New Zealand.

The Idea of Sea

Carol Brown Dances present
Nerve and dance film The Idea of Sea
at The Place Robin Howard Dance Theatre,
17 Duke's Road, London, WC2H 9AB
(London Dance Umbrella performance)

Mon 30 Sept / Tues 1st & Wed 2nd October at 8pm
Tickets: £5 - £15
Box Office: 020 7387 0031

Electric Fur

Carol has been awarded £20,000 by Capture, the Arts Council of England's screen-based dance initiative. Throughout summer and autumn 2002 Carol will collaborate with photographer Mattias Ek and videographer Abigail Norris to create Electric Fur, a installation of image-events exploring the permeability and interpenetration of space and the dancing body. The work will be completed in December 2002 and be presented at the Monaco Film Festival. If you would like to find out more about where and when you can see Electric Fur please email gwen@cueperformance.com.