FRAME, a weekly online lab series curated by Claire Loussouarn and Kyra Norman with Independent Dance, returns for a second edition. This time it will be led by Simon Ellis, Cara Hagan and Judy Cole alongside Kyra and Claire.
FRAME is intended for experienced movement practitioners with an interest in exploring the creative and connective possibilities of moving together online, as well as those who are just beginning to explore these ideas.
The invitation is to gather as a temporary dispersed community of artists to create a playful laboratory space of moving bodies, cameras and screens, seeing Zoom as a framing device as well as communication tool. The curators particularly welcome the opportunity this presents to work as a wide community with participants attending from around the UK and internationally.
Participants from the first edition of FRAME are welcome to join us again. Whilst the principles and approach will be repeated, a new group of facilitators and participants will bring a new dynamic.
Each session includes a 1.5 hour practical session, followed by 30 minutes for informal conversation and discussion. The lab is offered as a series of seven sessions, as follows:
Thursday 10 February Claire Loussouarn
Thursday 17 February Simon Ellis and Claire Loussouarn
Thursday 24 February Kyra Norman
Thursday 3 March Cara Hagan
Thursday 10 March Claire Loussouarn & Kyra Norman
Thursday 17 March Judy Cole
Thursday 24 March Claire Loussouarn & Kyra Norman
This online community was an incredibly important and valuable support for me and made me feel like I could continue to take creative risks and push what is possible
– FRAME participant
Claire Loussouarn is a movement artist, anthropologist and filmmaker. Her movement practice explores screen technology, eco-somatics, the feral body and the more-than-human world, especially plants and fungi. Claire has recently written an article in the International Journal of Screendance reflecting on embodiment and our relationship to screen technology called Moving with the Screen on Zoom: reconnecting with bodily and environmental awareness. She is co-founder and co-organiser of Kinesthesia, a moving image festival which approaches the moving image and the screen from the perspective of the body and its kinesthetic abilities.
Claire has also been working in collaboration with filmmaker Dominique Rivoal in Hackney Marshes for the last three years where they meet each month. The project explores many questions including embodied filmmaking, awareness, ecological movement, our relationship to the non-human, and the cycle of life and death.
Kyra Norman is an artist and researcher working with dance and moving image practices since 1998. She lives in Cornwall, UK, and mostly works outdoors, in re-purposed spaces and online. Between 2006 and 2015, Kyra was based part-time at the University of Bristol, where she completed a practice-based PhD exploring the screen as a site for choreographic practice. She is currently developing a live performance event, Cosmic Fabric, which draws on the geological activity of the Lizard peninsula, Cornwall (deep time moving) as a way into broader conversations about what it might mean to belong – to a place, a time, a community. She is a freelance performer, maker and curator, collaborates on artist-led and community-driven events, and is current Editor of the International Journal of Screendance.
Simon Ellis works with practices of choreography, filmmaking and dance. He was born in the Wairarapa in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but now lives in London and works at the Centre for Dance Research (Coventry). He grew up in a family where politicised conversations about human dignity, consumerism and even technology were common. These conversations have shaped his values as an artist, and underpin much of what his practice is about, and how it is conducted. He also thinks about the ways humans might value things that are not easily commodified, and likes to imagine a world filled with people who are sensitive to their own bodies, and the bodies of others.
Cara Hagan is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In her work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts.
In recent years, Hagan and her work have traveled to such gatherings as the Performática Festival in Cholula, Mexico, the Conference on Geopoetics in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Loikka Dance Film Festival in Helsinki, Finland, the Taos Poetry Festival in Taos, New Mexico, and to the Dance on Camera Festival in New York City. Extended residencies have taken place at Thirak India in Jaipur, India, Playa Summer Lake in the dynamic outback of Oregon, Roehampton University in London, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of North Carolina, School of the Arts.
Born in Cheltenham, raised in Australia and the United States, I returned to the UK in 1971 to train with The Rambert School of Ballet and later trained at ‘The Place’ – the London School of Contemporary Dance. This was followed by three years with the Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre where I performed and taught as well as creating performance pieces.
Moving to Bristol my performance work continued with many smaller companies, which included touring and solo shows. My focus then shifted to encompass movement, healing and meditation, and I trained as a shiatsu practitioner.
From the early 1990s I continued my shiatsu practice alongside environmental performance work as a ‘movement artist’ working on site-specific projects informed by the teaching of Suprapto Suryodarmo, an Indonesian movement teacher.
I currently work as a garden designer, which, alongside my movement practice, continues my interest in stage, rhythm, line and space – with a social and environmental context.