›2010s

›Lip(S) 01/02/2019 | Silo 6, Auckland, New Zealand
Carol Brown Dances & Collaborations perform in the opening of Lip(S) an exhibition curated by Claire Ulenberg exploring the multitudinous ways of being a woman and living in New Zealand. The title Lip(S) is in part inspired by the third wave feminist movement of Lipstick feminism, which embraces and reclaims the power of the feminine body and sexuality. It also acknowledges the psychoanalytic theory of Luce Irigaray (This Sex Which Is Not One) and her work on creating a Western feminist discourse based on sexuate subjectivity.  For this event, a trio revolves to the live percussion score of Phil Dadson and Chris O'Connor and duets unfold beneath the concrete organs of the silos opening the sensual address of the body to elliptical transformations. Lip(S) is a multi-sensory and layered experience presenting different perspectives on the body and art. It includes works by Gill Gatfield, Peata Larkin, Courtney Sina Meredith, Phil Dadson and Sharonagh Montrose.  Collaborators—Russell Scoones, Phil Dadson, Chris O'ConnorPerformers—Neza Jamnikar, Emilia Rubio, Jasmin Canuel, Maryam Besami Nagheri
›From Scratch:: Heart Heart 09/03/18 | Auckland Arts Festival, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
From Scratch are a percussion and performance group who experiment with sound, number and vibration. For Heart Heart as part of Auckland Arts Festival they present early and new works fuelled by fresh collaborations with Nell Thomas and Daniel Beban (Orchestra of the Spheres), NPME, Chris O'Connor, and Pitch Black. For DrumWheel, Carol Brown will perform a sustained turning choreography. In this polyrhythmic work the Fibonacci sequence and a spiralling structure of rhythmic patterns 1 to 13 are activated visually, acoustically and kinetically. The performance features a wide assortment of instruments including Eye'drum and Bass-drum stations, tuned tongue hand-bells and water-bells, gong-tree, nun-drum, zitherum, voices and others. Rhythmic and instrumental invention lie at the heart of From Scratch and have earned the group an international reputation. 546 mooncycles and still spinning. 
Performers—Rebecca Celebuski, Adrian Croucher, Shane Currey, Philip Dadson, Darryn Harkness, Chris O'Connor, Rachel Thomas, Carol Brown
›SINGULARITY :: drawing space + breathing spaces 07/09/17 | Ars Electronica 2017, Postcity, Linz, Austria
SINGULARITY :: drawing spaces + breathing spaces is a two part performance blending data, dance, music and architecture in a 360-degree haptic-digital environment.  Marked with tracking devices, three performers become an experiential interface, transforming virtual and physical movement into mutable architectural spaces.  Large 3D holographic constructions are  interactively drawn and moved by the dancers in a space defined by a live-render program, motion-tracking cameras, projection, and haze particles, A digitaly augmented world materializes as wormholes, kites, watery walls and magnetic particles. Audience and performer experience an intermixing of techno sound, movement and data through immersive transforming arcs of light. 
Creative Direction: Uwe Rieger (Architecture), Carol Brown (Choreography)Design & Programming—Yinan LiuDesign & Graphics—Ying MiaoMusic—Jérome Soudan (Mimetic), Russell ScoonesLighting—Margie MedlinPerformers—Zahra Killeen-Chance, Adam Naughton, Solomon Holly-MasseyCommissioned By—Ars Electronica 2017, Festival for Art, Technology and Society
›Acts of Becoming (1995, 2017) 11/08/17 | Ian Potter Gallery, NGV, Melbourne, Australia
Acts of Becoming is a solo of displaced memories and survival traces. Originally made in 1994 as an homage to Gertrud Bodenwieser (b.1890 Vienna, d.1957 Sydney) and as part of my PhD, I redeveloped this work for performances in the National Gallery Victoria as part of Rachel Fensham's curated event, Dancing Sculpture. Performing with what remains, I dialogue across times and places whilst gesturing to the body politic of women who risk everything. Bodenwieser trained dancers, Hilde Holger, Emmy Taussig, Shona Dunlop, Magda Hoyos, Hilary Napier, Trudl Dubsky, Bettina Vernon and Evelyn Ippen are women who either escaped, or went into self-imposed exile, as a result of the rise of fascism in Austria and Germany in the 1930s. Displaced from the cultural milieu that supported the development of Bodenwieser’s specific style of expressive modernism, they adapted to the New World they found themselves in, in South America, the Philipines, India, New Zealand and Australia.  Performing the role of host to their displaced and disappeared dance memories, I reimagined the Bodenwieser Tanzgruppe as a dispersed pluriverse; a choreographic worldview marked by global, ecstatic, eccentric and sensual shapes and figures. This resonant physical-vocal performance drew attention to hospitality and the hosting of strangers with their strange moves, during turbulent times.
Sound Design—Russell ScoonesCostuming—Kasia PolProduction—Natalie SmithCuration—Rachel FenshamPerformers—Carol BrownCommissioned By—The University of Melbourne
›6th Choreographic Coding Lab 14/02/16 | Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
The 6th Choreographic Coding Lab was co-curated by Jennifer Nikolais (AUT) and Carol Brown (UoA) at CoLAB, Auckland University of Technology, 14-19th February 2016. Initiated in 2013 as part of the Motion Bank research project of the Forsythe Company, Choreographic Coding Labs are focused on the research and creation of interactive digital dance events http://motionbank.org/en/content/about  The Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL) format offers unique opportunities of exchange and collaboration between digital media ‘code savvy’ artists who have an interest in translating aspects of choreography and dance into digital form and applying choreographic thinking to their own practice.F ive collaborative teams developed projects over five days through this incubator / laboratorium event.  The event invited questioning how choreographic thinking can be applied in environments extended by digital technologies. In the context of a deframing and decolonizing of spaces and bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand, curation of the Lab also sought to generate a local instantiation of the lab format. Cultural ways of knowing and forms of embodiment and knowledge shaped the design and content of the workshop in response to relational thinking in Māori thought and indigenous practices the Pacific. 
›FLOOD 20/06/15 | Prague Quadrenniale 2015, Vlatva River, Prague, Czech Republic
FLOOD weaves stories of Aotearoa into a journey between the city and the river in Prague. As the latest iteration within the performance cycle Tongues of Stone. FLOOD is a site-responsive performance from New Zealand that moves from Old Town Prague to the banks of the Vlatva River.  As ecolocial and mythical cleansing catastrophes, FLOODS involve inundations, deluges and overflows. Excessive and abundant, they overwhelm, wash away and dissolve terra firma introducing us to drowned realms as well as the flotsam and jetsam carried inland from the sea and gathered in their path.  Briefly creating oceanic  worlds, these sudden and intense events sweep objects and bodies into a saturated maelstrom, followed by a state of waterlogged exhaustion. Taking place as part of the New Zealand Exhibition, Ahua O Te Rangi, FLOOD retells the turbulent and consistent flooding of the Vlatva River, drawing on the poem of the same name written in 1602 by English-Czech poet Elizabeth Jane Weston. A soundscape, listened to on headphones provides the undertow for a gathering momentum as the audience is swept along through actions that rouse a sense of crisis as they lead to the riverbank and an act of recovery. Crossing times, places and cultures, the work makes connections through water, that most mutable of substances, between distant places, proposing that it is a carrier of memories. 
Choreography—Carol BrownDesign—Dorita HannahComposition—Russell ScoonesSculpture/Visual Art—Linda ErcegPerformers—Moana Nepia, Kelly Nash, Nancy Wijohn, Christina Houghton, Carolina Fleissner, Cassidy ScoonesCommissioned By—NZPQ15 & Creative New Zealand
›Film Series #1 10/10/14 | Tempo Dance Festival, Q Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand
What has been abandoned in the wake of progress? Two women are making a film with a sense-machine. Splicing between scenes from archival films about 1960s New Zealand, their gestures recompose image and text. As they play with the past they compose a different kind of future.  Performing at the threshold between the analogue and the digital, extending the reach of their gestures with virtual touch, they create a new habitat where their movements take on a distinctly reptilian quality connecting them with a distant past. Film Series #1 combines dance and choreography with physical computing, wearable technology, interaction, film, video and lighting design. This retrograde work brings new and old practices and technologies together.  Premiered as part of Prime in TEMPO 2014.
Media Design—Anne NiemetzLighting & Film—Margie MedlinChoreography—Carol BrownPerformers—Zahra Killeen-Chance, Julie Van RenenCommissioned By—TEMPO 2014
›TUNA MAU 22/11/13 | Oceanic Biennale, Silo Park, Auckland, New Zealand
TUNA MAU is a dispersed site-responsive event that transforms the reclaimed land of Tamaki Makaurau’s Wynyard Quarter into a performance landscape by unearthing buried narratives that recall the former Waitemata coastline and the local stream once filled with indigenous long-finned eel, as well as the pan-Pacific story of lovers Hine and Tuna. 
Choreography—Carol BrownSound—Russell ScoonesDesign—Dorita HannahDesign Installation—Amanda Yates Performers—Georgie Goater, Nancy Wijohn, Seidah Karati, Sophie Williams, Becca Wood, Carol BrownCommissioned By—AUT
›Seed 02/11/11 | Christ Church Neighbourhood House, Philadelphia, USA
Seed began life in Orere Point when Gin Macallum and Niki Cousineau from Subcircle joined Russell Scoones, Carol Brown and family for a two-week residency. The research continued in Prague during the Prague Quadrenniale and was finally produced in Philadelphia, opening at the Christ Church Neighbourhood House, November 2nd 2011. This is Carol Brown's second collaboration with Subcircle, following Crevice made in 2003. Seed gathers its stories from places distant and near. It carries resonant memories of journeys through long wet grasses, into Manuka forests and along Pohutakawa clad beaches near Orere Point, it meanders blindly in settler city neighbourhoods, past the white picket fences and verandahs of Grey Lynn houses and loses its way in the Symonds St cemetery.  It gathers momentum during al fresco dining with the unexpected swooping of a Tui and finds its guardian in the honeyeater who flies into the War Memorial Hall where we rehearse and refuses to leave.
Gin MacCallum and Niki Cousineau danced like two wavering voices that hushed us and left us craving to hear and see them. —Jackson, M. (2011). Two dancers in Seed are a spellbinding pair. Philadelphia Enquirer.
Choreographic direction - Carol Brown Dance & Choreography—Gin Macallum, Niki CousineauDesign—Jorge CousineauSound—Russell Scoones, Jorge Cousineau, Rosie Langabeer
›REVOLVE 08/10/11 | Body Festival, GeoDome, Christchurch, New Zealand
What wakes you and what keeps you awake? REVOLVE sheds light on the ‘stuff’ dreams are made of, the night-stories and bodily states that shape our sleeping hours. This intimate work premiered in the GeoDome as part of Christchurch's Body Festival 4-5th October 2011.  Through a mytho-poetic journey, I invited audiences to experience a series of states tracing the path of the sleeper’s mind and body from dusk to dawn.  Driven by a curiosity about the body, its rhythms and potential for change, the work alludes to the planetary, physiological and personal cycles that round our lives. Wearing a sensor skin-suit that interacts with light, speed and balance, my movements shape the sound world as I explore the sonic perceptual thresholds of the choreographic score.  At once visceral and technologically mediated wired nature provides a platform for exploring the internal life of the body.
Media Design—Anne NiemetzLighting Design—Margie MedlinSleep Science—Phillipa GanderCostume Design—Christina HoughtonSound Design—Russell ScoonesPerformers—Carol BrownCommissioned By—The Body Festival
›Maybe: A duet for a man and a woman swallowed by space
2003 - remounted 05/10/11 Bare Bones the Decade, Dance Xchange, Birmingham Hippodrome; Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London; Stiwdio Westin Studio, Wales Millennium Centre, UK
This duet for Bare Bones was remounted for their October 2011 10 Year Anniversary Tour, Bare Bones The Decade.  Maybe was included in a programme of iconic solos and duets from previous productions including works by Hofesh Schechter, Charlotte Vincent, Jasmin Vardimon and Luca Silvestrini.
Maybe was initially made the year of the Space Shuttle Colombia disaster in 2003.  Shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission, the Space Shuttle Colombia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere resulting in the loss of all seven crew members.  I began the piece with the simple gesture of looking up and inviting perception of the what if of space travel and the human stories it catalyses towards unknown destinies.  For this re-working of the piece I was reminded that my initial plan for the piece was always going to be shaped by the qualities and unique physicalities of the dancers.  I am delighted we have been able to rework it—between New Zealand and the UK—a process that has happened  without the need to fly through space but with the  remote presencing of online communication. 
Performers—Omar Gorden, Suzanne FirthMusic—Russell ScoonesCommissioned By—Bare Bones, DanceXchange
›Mnemosyne
15/06/11 | Prague Quadrenniale 2011, Veletztrni Palace, Prague, Czech Republic
Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess who personified memory and presided over a pool of remembrance in Hades. The concept for this installation designed by Dorita Hannah with sound by Russell Scoones is to re-present fragments of 3 productions created between 2005 and 2011 - Aarero Stone, Her Topia and Tongues of Stone - through a performance installation that engages with the mythical figure of Mnemosyne and her pool of remembrance. Through the use of objects, garments, suspended or embedded, choreographic gestures and sounds the installation both archives and animates memories and  histories of  these past productions. Carol Brown catalogues, maps and reconstructs phrases and artefacts suspended or embedded in the Fly-Tower (NZ's national pavilion), enfleshing these fleeting appearances with melancholic desire. Mnemosyne was selected for inclusion in the National Exhibit for New Zealand at the Prague Quadrenniale for Performance Design and Space 2011 and was performed daily in the Veletztrni Palace.  A preview of this event was held as part of the Visual Arts Programme for the Auckland Arts Festival 8-12th March 2011. Performance Design—Dorita HannahSound Design—Russell Scoones Choreography & Performance—Carol BrownCommissioned By—PQ National Exhibition Curators for New Zealand
›Tongues of Stone 08/04/11 | Strut, Perth Dancing City, Perth, Australia
Every stone in this city will become a tongue to tell my story (Ovid, Metamorphosis). As a site-sensitive dance-architecture event, Tongues of Stone transformed Perth into a network of stories experienced through movement, sound and imagery. Led from underground to riverview, the mobile audience mapped the city and its invisible histories, through a soundscape of  multiple voices.  A woman who has lost her tongue struggles to communicate with her newly wed sister; another reads her body like the map of a city that is both foreign and familiar; a chorus of water-carriers remember and trace tributaries of ancient wetlands; and a girl-band plays their bodies like angry instruments against the concrete facades. Tongues of Stone re-imagines Perth as a place of many stories streaming through its streets, laneways and civic sites. Link to You Tube:  http://youtu.be/F1snTjrlMeM.
Tongues of Stone's strength is its ability to highlight forgotten features of the city - to make the mundane appear alien and even beautiful...Tongues of Stone is a visually arresting work that casts a new light on urban spaces. —Dance Review, The Western Australian
Concept—Carol Brown, Dorita HannahChoreography—Carol Brown Design—Dorita HannahMusic/Sound—Russell ScoonesProduction—Agnes Michele, STRUT Company in association with Curtin University Design Assistants—Lauren Skogstad, Sarah BurrellResearch Assistant—Becca WoodCommissioned By—STRUT
›Rest Shift Rest 06/02/11
A room for experimental sleep.  Visitors are invited into a clinical room set up for the examination of their own patterns of rest.  After an initial questionaire, each visitor is invited by a host ‘clinician’ to put on a dressing gown and lie on a luminous bed.  Above them they see a mirrored projection of their own bodies.  As they shift and move through different postures of rest, they can feel vibrations from the sound of their own amplified movement and the live mix of this with the dream recall of distant others.  The video flickers between the subject lying on the bed and a host of other bodies whose virtual presences start to encourage a mimetic relation over time.
›SLIP I'm not falling I'm just hanging on for as long as you'll hold me 18/10/10 | Auckland Town Hall, Auckland, New Zealand
Commissioned by New Zealand's leading mixed ability company, Touch Compass for their Triple Bill season, Slip is a forty minute work for six dancers and a singer. Between flying and falling, scenes of suspension expose the intimacy of support and the possibilities of surrender.  In developing this work, the performers wrote their greatest hits, dressed up, dressed down and danced out their songs whilst asking what it means to be ruled by contingencies. Link to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayZ9E980qE, http://youtu.be/8JErWkoH660
... tender, intimate and powerful... Carol Brown's Slip was remarkable, mixing private narratives with a penetrating analysis of vulnerability, identity and the strength of community. —Horsley, F. (2010, August). Touch Compass Triple Bill. DANZ Quarterly. Slip, is an unconventional work of quiet yet real power. —Jennifer Shennan, Dominion Post
Choreography—Carol BrownSound—Russell ScoonesCostuming—Emma RamsleyDramaturgy—Fiona GrahamPerformers—Kerryn McMurdo, Alisha MacLennan, Jesse Johnston-Steel,. Julia Milsom, Emilia Rubio, Dan KingCommissioned By—Touch Compass
›Urban Devas 09/04/10 | Pier 3, Auckland, New Zealand
Urban Devas, a collaboration between sonic artist Phil Dadson and choreographer Carol Brown was commissioned by Auckland City Council for  Living Room 2010, as a Public Art Event. A roving chorus of 10 women dressed in high visibility clothing and carrying megaphones inhabit a series of civic sites within a Central Business District.  Informed by Max Ernst's graphic novel and artist's book Une Semaine de Bonte (A week of Kindness) they appear as surreal figures - devas - between reality and myth.  Arriving unannounced and out of the blue, they sing strange greetings, howl, whisper and metamorphose into bird-like standing figures, gathering attention and transforming civic spaces into performance enounters.   Sonic Artist—Phil DadsonCostume Design—Christina HoughtonResearch Assistant—Becca Wood Performers - Emily Adams, Tracey Buchanan, Sarah Campus, Kerryn McMurdo, Ai Fuji Nelson, Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann, Evania Vallyon, Becca Wood, Alana Yee, Liana YewCommissioned By—Auckland City Council