Artists and curators Becky Edmunds, Claudia Kappenberg and Lucy Cash explore film and video work in relation to choreographic composition, as well as discussing what might be ‘dance’ in unconventional screen dance works, and whether curating is also a kind of choreography. They draw upon their experiences of co-curating the What If… festival with Christinn Whyte and Gill Clarke in 2010. Multiple videos are screened during the talk; most are linked below except where not available.
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Films screened or mentioned during the talk (in order):
Film 1: Death is Certain
Film 2: Curse on my Dreams
Film 3: El Fuego
Film 4: Sight Reading (redux)
Film 5: Subtitles
Becky Edmunds
Becky Edmunds trained as a dancer and choreographer at Laban Centre, London in the mid 1980’s. She produced live art and dance work, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with visual artists, photographers, scientists and dance artists until 2000, when she shifted to a screen-based practice.
Her video work now has two distinct strands, which inform and influence each other. She has a research-led screen dance art practice, which seeks to deepen the screen application of dance practice. In 2006, she was supported by an Arts Council International Fellowship to be artist-in-residence at the VideoDanza Festival de Buenos Aires (Argentina), creating during her time there, a series of dance shorts which toured internationally. In 2009 she continued her video practice through a residency in Sweden as a guest of the SHOOT Dance for Screen festival.
She also works as a specialist dance videographer and has collaborated with a number of dance and performance artists and organisations to produce video documentation. Becky has made a series of documentaries including the installation Working Day (2003), and the short film Have You Started Dancing Yet? (2004) which toured national and international screen dance festivals. In 2008, she completed Living Architecture – a 40 minute documentary on Rudolf Laban.
Becky is a member of the artist-led group Movement 12, and an Associate Artist with Blast Theory.
Claudia Kappenberg
Claudia Kappenberg is a performance and media artists and Senior Lecturer in Performance and Visual Art at the University of Brighton, UK. Her projects comprise single screen work as well as screen-based installations and live site-specific events and have been shown across Europe, the US and the Middle East. Claudia founded the Lost Parade performance company and is co-founder of the White Market project. She runs a Screendance Network and is Editor of the International Journal of Screendance.
Lucy Cash
Lucy Cash is an interdisciplinary artist. She is also an Artsadmin Associate Artist, and an Associate Artist with South East Dance for 2010 – 2012. In 2009 she was awarded a Screendance Fellowship from South East Dance in recognition of her work in performance installation and film / choreography.
Originally from a background in choreography, performance and theatre, Lucy began her career as a solo artist in 2000 with a three minute commission from the BFI / FilmFour to make Three Minute Wonder. Her work has been show on BBC2, BBC4, Channel4 and FilmFour as well as at international festivals.
In her practice she is drawn to developing playful concepts that use shifts in perception or logic as a starting point. She creates pieces that are poetic and scientific, philosophical and humorous and intimate and political at the same time. She often works with a range of people from different communities and fields of expertise and increasingly explores notions of self-invention and story-telling – often working on the edges between fiction and reality.
As well as solo projects, she also makes collaborative performance works. Recent collaborations include works with Anna Kryztstek, Christina Ciupke, Goat Island Performance and Rajni Shah. In 2010 she also collaborated on a film with Becky Edmunds – Seven Ways South – for the Siobhan Davies Space.
Adapted from bios published in 2010
