The performer and writer, moderated by Heni Hale, speak about their collaborations – on the project Control Signal, and in dialogue on how the performances not made, or not seen, hold a place in our heads, lives, and dreams, influencing our actions, flowering in the mind. The project that never gets made lives as a kind of horizon that urges us forward asking a question we can’t answer. They also touch on the concept of gesture, how to end a performance, and more, ultimately asking, ‘As makers (of performance, or writing, or both) how do we leave room for other people’s imaginations? How do we guide and encourage acts of imagination, without proscribing their boundaries?’
Learn More:
Control Signal (work discussed in the talk, with sharing of video trailer and written responses)
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2019 and was presented in partnership with Sadler’s Wells, and supported by the Society for Dance Research and University of Roehampton.
Mary Paterson is a writer, artist and producer. Her publications include Imagination and Potential (LADA, 2017), and Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation (Intellect, forthcoming 2019). With Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin she co-edits the journal Something Other, a platform for experiments in writing and the live.
From 2006-2014 Mary was part of the experimental writing collaboration, Open Dialogues, whose publications include RITE (2008) and NOTA (2014), and whose workshops and performances toured the UK, Europe and the US. As a producer, she works in socially engaged practice and community arts, as well as towards radical forms of arts evaluation. She is currently the Chair of the Board of the disability arts company, Extant. She prefers to work in collaboration.
Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. With her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, she is engaged in collaborative performance-making processes. Karen was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. She now works at South House, her new studio in Faversham, Kent. Her focus is on artistic negotiation in the making process and finding non-traditional structures for working and composing live performance works. The performance style and content is found by making it. Her work follows paths of thought made visible and includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet. She is paying attention as a practice of social cooperation.
Karen has 30 years experience leading performance composition workshops at art centres, art schools and universities in the US, UK, and Europe, including extended performance devising workshops.
As published in 2019.
