A series of efforts to reimagine our communal and choreographic process through shared creative activity.
Zoom Information for
Working Group #3: We need to talk about Zoom.
January 13, 2021 / 6:30-7:30 EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82272563861?pwd=OVRoNWtpSVFzcEU1Q3U0QlFpbUFjQT09
Meeting ID: 822 7256 3861
Passcode: tD9GHy
Click here to join meeting
What It Is
The Landingspace Project will offer a series of creative workshops and discussions through the fall of 2020. Open to artists with a dance and movement practice, these workshops will facilitate an exploration of some of the more urgent themes faced by creative artists in this moment: escape, landing, fantasy, resistance, abolition, borders. We invite participants to consider both the oppressive structures they are currently working within, and what would happen if those structures were taken away. Following each workshop participants will be able to able to attend a working group to discuss workshop themes, develop projects, and deepen connections with other project artists.
Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash
How It Works
Initially Landingspace will offer a series of creative workshops and discussions through the fall of 2020. Open to artists with a dance and movement practice, these workshops will facilitate an exploration of some of the more urgent themes faced by creative artists in this moment: escape, landing, fantasy, resistance, abolition, borders. We invite participants to consider both the oppressive structures they are currently working within, and what would happen if those structures were taken away. Following each workshop participants will be able to able to attend Fertile Ground workspaces to discuss workshop themes, develop projects, and deepen connections with other project artists.
In the spring of 2021, workshop participants are invited to form collaborative working groups to explore self-directed creative processes. Participants might explore dance, or other generative creative modes. Landingspace will train facilitators to lead these working groups, and offer support developing and documenting each group’s project. While there is no requirement to make “a work,” we hope that each group will share their outcomes with other participants, and with a broader audience.
Photo by Khara Woods on Unsplash
Who We Are
Landingspace is a series of efforts to reimagine our communal and choreographic process through shared creative activity. Led by Crystal Michelle Perkins (OSU) Benny Simon (Ohio University) Fen Kennedy (University of Alabama) and Tammy Sugden Carrasco (SUNY Brockport) this series offers dance and interdisciplinary artists a place to come together, work collaboratively on projects, nurture their skills, and support each other in this moment of ongoing change.
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
#1
Tension, Redirection, and Abolitionist Thinking
Is tension something we can push into, and rebound away from? Can tension become a support? What kinds of tension are generative and what kinds of tension demand urgent attention to ease and healing? Where do our identities rub painfully against the friction of our lives, and what does it mean to redirect ourselves into new directions, gradually eroding new pathways over time?
Artists exist in a world of systems - institutional systems, systems of oppression and privilege, systems of power. Which systems impede our creative impulses? Which systems pull us in directions we do not want to go? Can we resist, redirect, and make tension our ally in changing or dismantling these systems so that we can thrive? If we approach creative thinking, and social thinking, with the knowledge that the systems around us can - or must - topple, does that change how we see possibility in movement? How does a rich investigation of tension and redirection support a clear articulation of what must be broken down and changed in the world around us?
Workshop facilitated by: mayfield brooks
Date and Time: Saturday, November 7 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group facilitated by: Fen Kennedy
Date and Time: Wednesday, November 11 / 18:30-19:30 EST
Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82272563861?pwd=OVRoNWtpSVFzcEU1Q3U0QlFpbUFjQT09
Meeting ID: 822 7256 3861
Passcode: tD9GHy
Photo by Nicolas J. Harris
#2
Landing, Reimagining, Value and Validity
How do current contexts for choreographic endeavors make way for newly imagined creative spaces, processes, and outcomes? What is important and relevant about re-imagining the creative process and performance at this time? How might evidence of a reimagined creative process appear (or disappear) in the physical work, and to what degree is this relevant?
This working group is interested in linking process with purpose, and invites the reflection of and evolution beyond one’s familiar choreographic practices to yield new methods of making in the context of Covid-19. This group creates space for rebirth and renewal of one’s creative process, the reimagining of the format and sensation of “performance,” and reflection upon the ways in which the interrogation of creative process permeates into choreographic outcomes. If a “landing” in the creative process suggests a moment of pause in which the makers/collaborators share or receive response about the work, what might be the value of such moments of pause? What does it feel like to be ready to “land”? What does it feel like and mean to be in a creative process that may have no use for landings at all? Ultimately, what is the value of our evolved creative processes in the field and for our work? How is the validity and vitality of the work linked to what occurs in our creative spaces?
Workshop facilitated by: Bebe Miller
Date and Time: Saturday, December 5 / 10:30-12:30 EST / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group facilitated by: Tammy Sugden Carrasco
Date and Time: Wednesday, December 9 / 18:30-19:30 EST
#3 Borders, Boundaries, and Surveillance
Dancing in quarantine calls us to confront and reimagine the limits of our creativity. In this time of necessary constraints, we welcome the opportunity to reexamine the social and spatial borders and boundaries that define our identities and roles as artists and citizens. Although borders and boundaries can be exclusionary, they can also act as powerful engines that celebrate difference, kindling productive and creative relationships with each other and our technologically-oriented world. Inside this paradox of bounded freedom is the consensual power to accept or reject new ideas and people, to give and receive critique, and to challenge existing structures of power through art.
In this workshop we will consider ways to activate these new social and technological relationships in our newly limited and highly surveilled spaces. How can we redirect our energies in ways that free us from past conceptions of artistic collaboration and training? What new formulations of movement, location, sensation, and accessibility are available to us? What kinds of bodies, platforms, and processes can enable this activation? And how do these activities create healthy and sustainable borders and boundaries?
Workshop facilitated by: Jessica Rajko
Date and Time: Saturday, January 9 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group facilitated by: Benny Simon
Date and Time: Wednesday, January 13 / 18:30-19:30 EST
Photo by Benny Simon
#4 Escape, Fantasy, and the Blue Sky
In this time, is it possible to focus on designing dances that move beyond the confinements of present conversations/expectations, and make room for truly unconfined choreographic invention, with boundless bodies, and borderless conceptual practices? Can we operate as if we have made it to our “promise(d) land(s)” as a way of speeding up arrival? Is there a place to even arrive? Through this work we give more weight to the presence of the body as it is and as it wants to be. As a way to manifest what we imagine, we desire more actionable activities around the work we fantasize about having the freedom to do. WE resist certain modes of being, by responding to the world with possibilities of lightness, serious joy, and dynamic explorations of desire. Blue sky work is for those who dream about escaping pre-designed systems of power through their work. It is for the vibrant embodied structuring of futures, disruptions, and self-directed identities. It encourages all to participate in ways that we have not yet imagined as a field, but that this group might be more equipped to navigate than those who have designed the current systems of power.
Workshop facilitated by: Jennifer Harge
Date and Time: February 6 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group facilitated by: Crystal Michelle Perkins
Date and Time: February 10 / 18:30 - 19:30 EST
Extended Workshop/Project Building facilitated by: Crystal Michelle Perkins
Date and Time: April 10 / 10:00-16:00
Photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash
Schedule and Registration
#2 Landing, Reimagining,
Value and Validity
Workshop
Facilitated by: Bebe Miller
Saturday, December 5 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group
Facilitated by: Tammy Sugden Carrasco
Wednesday, December 9 / 18:30-19:30 EST
#1 Tension, Redirection, Abolitionist Thinking
Workshop
Facilitated by: mayfield brooks
Saturday, November 7 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group
Facilitated by: Fen Kennedy
Wednesday, November 11 / 18:30-19:30 EST
#3 Borders, Boundaries,
and Surveillance
Workshop
Facilitated by: Jessica Rajko
Saturday, January 9 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Working Group
Facilitated by: Benny Simon
Wednesday, January 13 / 18:30-19:30 EST
#4 Escape, Fantasy,
and the Blue Sky
Workshop
Facilitated by: Jennifer Harge
Saturday, February 6 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Workshop
Facilitated by: Crystal Michelle Perkins
Wednesday, February 10 / 10:30-12:30 EST
Extended Workshop/Project Building
Facilitated by: Crystal Michelle Perkins
April 10 / 10:00-16:00