AVBODY: Symposium on the Audiovisual Body

9-12 June 2018
University of Huddersfield

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.
£100 includes workshops, presentations, and coffee/lunch on 11th and 12th June

AVBODY brings together practitioner-researchers working with digital media, dance tech, screendance, screen studies, experimental performance, performer training, visual anthropology, and other fields to examine relations between audiovisuality and embodiment in the contemporary moment.

WORKSHOPS
Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th June

• Making a Laboratory with the Judaica project
• Two Trainers Prepare with Marie Hallager Andersen and Maria Kapsali
• Afrofuturist Ancestral Movement and Rhythm with Nwando Ebizie

See below for workshop descriptions and times.

PRESENTATIONS
Monday 11th & Tuesday 12th June

Keynotes:
• Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, London
• Nwando Ebizie, Performance Artist, Composer, Musician, London / Manchester, UK
• Matej Matejka, Director of Studio Matejka, The Grotowski Institute, Poland
• The Judaica Project: Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel

Papers and performances:
Marta Arjona, Guillermo Luis Horta Betancourt, Deborah Black, Renate Braeuninger, Jonny Briggs, Shane Byrne, Outi Condit, Chiara Crupi, Serap Erincin, Steve Gibson, Andrew Leslie Hooker, Claudia Kappenberg, Ferdinand Kavall, Ilona Krawczyk, Claire Loussouarn, Paula McCloskey, Silvia Robert Montalà, Solomiya Moroz, Francesca Placanica, Trond Reinholdtsen, Dominique Rivoal, Elizabeth de Roza, Stephanie Scheubeck, Rachel Sweeney, Monica Tolia, Ian Truelove, Tanya Ury, Sam Vardy, Zara Worth, and others.

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Workshop Descriptions

Participation in all workshops is included with the symposium registration fee, however please confirm by email which ones you plan to attend.

MAKING A LABORATORY: EMBODIED RESEARCH AND THE AUDIOVISUAL BODY
Workshop with the Judaica Project (Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, Agnieszka Mendel)
Saturday 9th June @ 10:00-14:00 and Sunday 10th June @ 10:00-14:00

This workshop introduces a new audiovisual research method for inventing, analyzing, and articulating embodied knowledge. We will share a new notation system for structuring experimental practice and explore a collaborative editorial process to generate a new kind of audiovisual document.

Participation on both days is required. The workshop will include some simple embodied songwork practice, but no specific abilities are assumed. If possible please bring a small portable video camera with you, such as a smartphone.

More about the Judaica Project

TWO TRAINERS PREPARE
Workshop with the Marie Hallager Andersen and Maria Kapsali
Saturday 9th June @ 15:00-17:00

This workshop will offer insight into some key questions of 'Two Trainers Prepare', a year-long project (Sept 2017- Aug 2018) which investigates the development of an interdisciplinary yoga-based artistic practice and pedagogy through a series of tasks posted online. It will deal with the way a predominantly physical practice has been accommodated and shaped by an online environment and how notions of partnership, collaboration, and preparation have been actualised through a public facing Blog. The workshop asks participants to engage creatively with tasks and with the process of posting reflections — moving between physical presence (in doing the task) and online presence (in reflections) — by inviting them to interpret and carry out some of the tasks already posted online and find ways to report back thoughts and responses on the blog.

Marie Hallager Andersen is a freelance choreographer, dance artist and filmmaker based in Denmark.

Maria Kapsali is a Lecturer in Physical Performance in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds.

More about Two Trainers Prepare

AFROFUTURIST ANCESTRAL MOVEMENT AND RHYTHM
Workshop with Nwando Ebizie
Sunday 10th June @ 15:00-18:00

Taking Afro Diaspora Ritual Movement and rhythm as an Afrofuturist technology, this workshop will connect participants with an ancestral movement, geared towards the future self. Joining inner life (imagination, mythic ancestral past, individual neurology) with outer life (the group, the present moment, the senses). Building up movement, rhythm and song we will work towards group improvisation and emotive release. The mythic, scientific and online video culture will meet in movements of sensory deprivation and immersion, inviting participants to challenge assumptions and bias about their own perceptual frameworks.

Nwando Ebizie is a multidisciplinary artist whose work converges around performance art personas, Live Art, music, Neuroscience of Perceptual Phenomena and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Through her projects she investigates the contradictions of identity found in projected personas, the formation of mythopoeia, and the transcendence of ecstatic group ritual. She has performed around the world. Her current strand of work was created on discovering she had a rare neurological condition called 'Visual Snow' which means she sees halos, afterimages and Seurat-like pointillism dots at all times.

More about Nwando Ebizie

The FULL PROGRAMME (10MB) is now available for download here!

(The print version will also include the essay “The Video Way of Thinking”.)

AVBODY is supported by

“Judaica: Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (AHRC Leadership Fellowship 2016-2018)

The Research Centre for Performance Practices (ReCePP) at University of Huddersfield

See programme for image credits.