Setting the Vocabulary

Critical Encounters – Setting the Vocabulary

Kayla Bowtell, Jane Carr, Pavlos Kountouirioutis, Kate Sicchio

Pavlos Started by introducing Critical Encounters first season “Moving the language of dance” that was inspired by Laban`s book “Language of Movement”. This season’s aim is to start thinking about dance differently.

The space has been set up in to three main areas so that the lecturers could say what they are interested in and where they see dance going in the future.

Kate Sicchio is interested in dance and technology in performance such as real time videos. I find this very interesting and even though Kate was just speaking to her audience as she stepped around the space the camera was detecting movements and the real time videos were changing and this kept the audience engaged.  Kate spoke about extending the body though the technology to create equilibrium.

An audience would think about a dance performance as people within the space yet the computers just see movement and it is not about the bodies in the space.

Is Kate a choreographer or a programmer? Does she work mainly with the technology to manipulate the dance or with the dance material to manipulate the technology?

Jane Carr spoke about her previous experiences and where she trained and how she got to where she is today using a power point. She spoke about inner and outer self and embodiment along with-

Body : Mind

Self : Other

Nature :Culture

Kayla Dougan Bowtell took a more practical approach to the workshop I found this intriguing and exciting. It involved audience participation and was a game/ experiment in to sharing her thoughts. 1 participant had to choose a bucket with a flag in with words on there were, resources, experience, dance, participation, movement or write your own. You then filled the bucket with sand throw a bean bag on to the corresponding number to the bucket and made a sand castle. The flag then goes in the sandcastle and you throw a bean bag to where the next participant must stand when throwing the bean bag. The cue for Kayla to share was the sound of the bean bag on the floor.

The most interesting thing I found was resources she said; be open and playful in structuring resources and collecting resources enables other things to be explored and developed.

I was intrigued by all lecturers in some way and found it great how they are all very different yet collaborate together. The word collaborate was brought up and I agree that if you collaborate with other artists you may agree on some things but there is a lot you may disagree on and I think this is the joy of working with other artists, and finding out who you are as an artist.