FRAME is a new weekly online lab series curated by Claire Loussouarn and Kyra Norman with Independent Dance, led by Claire and Kyra, Laila Diallo, Katrina McPherson and Sandra Reeve.
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. As curators we are particularly keen to extend this invitation to artists who may not be able to access ID’s studio-based programme due to geographical or other access issues. We welcome the opportunity this presents to work as a wide community across the UK and beyond.
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.
Each session will include 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 14 October Claire Loussouarn
Thursday 21 October Laila Diallo
Thursday 28 October Kyra Norman
Thursday 4 November Katrina McPherson
Thursday 11 November Claire Loussouarn & Kyra Norman
Thursday 18 November Sandra Reeve
Thursday 25 November Claire Loussouarn & Kyra Norman
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.
Laila is a Canadian-born dancer and dance maker based in Bristol. Notions of impermanence, of our perception of the passing of time, and of how we negotiate togetherness thread through recent projects and current research. Her making process and performance practice embrace experimentation and the interplay between the predetermined and the spontaneous. Alongside devising and self-producing work for live performance, Laila often works as movement director in theatre and opera.
Recent commissions include: All my Song, Royal Ballet/Joyce Theatre (UK/USA, 2019), Husk for Candoco Dance Company/Kettle’s Yard reopening (UK, 2018), Something about wilderness and several attempts at taming beauty, Skanes Dansteater (Sweden, 2017). The recipient of a Rayne Fellowship for Choreographers in 2006, Laila has also been Associate Artist at ROH2, Royal Opera House, between 2009 and 2012, and recipient of a 2018 Leverhulme Art Scholarship through Bristol Old Vic Ferment.
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.
Sandra Reeve is an environmental movement teacher/researcher, a movement artist and a movement psychotherapist/supervisor. ‘Move into Life’ is her cyclical programme of autobiographical and environmental movement workshops in West Dorset. Her movement research is influenced by 33 years of Amerta Movement, complexity thinking, ecology, meditation, gardening and performance.
She both facilitates and creates small-scale environmental events, as well as mentoring individual movement-based creative projects. Her books include Nine Ways of Seeing a Body, Embodied Lives(ed.) and Body and Awareness(ed.) (Triarchy Press) and she is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter.