Beginning the conversation

Let's continue the conversations that emerged at The Little Con-ference, May 10 & 11, 2014.

The Little Con-ference

—A weekend of dance improvisation practice and performance

Sat 10 & Sun 11 May 2014
9am-6pm
B1.48 Dance Studio, Deakin University, Burwood

video excerpts


The Little Con was established in 2005 by a group of Melbourne based dance improvisers
(Paul Romano, Joey Lehrer, Ann-maree Ellis, Shaun McLeod, Grace Walpole, Dianne Reid)
to provide a regular platform for performance and feedback. Monthly performance events were held at the Cecil Street Studio for several years. (http://thelittlecon.net.au/)

In 2013 The Little Con name was revived with three events—
Middle Stages/Maximum Flavour, a season at Studio 202, curated by Catherine Magill;
The Little Con Express, a durational event in the red train at CERES facilitated by Dianne Reid; and The Little Con at the border, a practice sharing intensive with a public performance in Albury/Wodonga facilitated by Ann-maree Ellis.

The 2014 Little Con-ference is a weekend dedicated to sharing improvisation practice and performance research. Driven by a desire for regular opportunities for intensive shared practice and dialogue, this event also acknowledges the academic research projects currently being undertaken by a number of improvisation practitioners. This is an invitation for practitioners to share their research through practice-based/performative presentations…looking at embodied ways to engage with theoretical terrain in a context of practice-based exchange.

Saturday Performed Papers

Paul Roberts —Body, Truth, and Trickery
                            Live performance and social reality

This performance-lecture details Paul Roberts’ artistic research into and out of his creative practice of performance improvisation. In particular is considered its relationship with notions of social accountability and human connectedness. Featured will be moments of live performance in which Paul will draw on his training with dance and clown.

Sue Broadway —Same Same and Different Different

Sue Broadway aka Soobee plays hostess to a performative discussion drawing on her experiences as a clown and improviser. Clowning is a much maligned and frequently misunderstood artform, often judged on the manifestations of its worst practitioners, rather than its best. So is improvisation. The session will begin with a five minute solo in which Sue will attempt to perform a piece drawing on her experience in both disciplines, followed by a five minute talk from Sue about her history in both artforms. This will lead into an open forum on the subject, which may feature comment from Paul Roberts and Penny Baron, both experienced improvisers and also clowns. Sue says: As a clown I have always provided myself with impulses to improvise - attempting tricks that are hit and miss, that overreach my ability, handing power to the audience to intervene, performing in unexpected places including countries where I can't speak the language, and working with props that behave in random ways. As an improviser (with L plates) a big part of my process has been to accept and utilize the skills and capacities that are tattooed on my brain and to find ways to both use them and override them in the same breath.

Bronwen Kamasz —Propping up things with sticks 

                                           I am a lecture: I will impart knowledge
                                           I am a performance: I will entertain

I propose a performative presentation centred around my arts practice as an improviser and a puppeteer, a physical theatre performer and other fancy stuff like Bodyweather and installation artist.
I am investigating and researching relationships between puppet, puppeteer, people, audience potent and environments.
The improvising performer/puppet is one entity and yet a duet is occurring with all the conventions of an improvised duet: the interrupting, mirroring, polyphony, relationship...........
What is occurring uncanny when the performer/puppet is improvising, how are they present, attentive, listening, communicating with audience, with each other?  What is the nature, quality of the puppet’s presence during the duet?  What is the nature, quality of the performer’s presence during the duet?  Are curious they wholly different qualities, do they shift, are they identical, one and the same......?  Are the puppet’s mirror neurons simply firing in response to its puppeteer or is this duet dialogical?
I am investigating and interrogating improvisation....puppetry.....research led practice. The form of my per/formed paper critiques reified notions of academia and palpable research in universities where canny learning paradigms are becoming increasingly focussed on product over process.
As an improviser the content of my paper will be                 improvised.
As a puppeteer the content of my paper will be                 puppeteered.
The form of my paper Critical might:
a. Play with the ubiquity of the academic lecture (use it to subvert it)
b. Disrupt, interrupt or subtly shift equivocal the conventions of the academic lecture (muck about with the stuff of it)
c. Overtly work against the academic lecture (this should ideally be really entertaining)
d. unfamiliar A rant about access to knowledge when excluded from a system
e. Some or all of the above

Dianne Reid —Improcinemaniac

When I improvise I am practicing screendance.
My dance is improcinematic (simultaneously practicing screendance and improvisation)
I am bringing perceptive technologies (the camera and its microscopic and telescopic
capacities) into my imaginative vocabulary as I notice and occupy each frame, and make
connections from frame to frame. I am the camera and the subject, I am the moment and the montage. I have cinesthesia (the bringing together of imagined location and sensation).

Sunday Performed Papers

Shaun McLeod —Watching or attending - the performance of Authentic Movement

Shaun will invite a member of the audience to step forward and act as witness (and guardian) to his 'Authentic Movement' practice. Moving with eyes closed he will performatively present his internal, reflective movement practice. Accompanied by a series of textual provocations (slides) this witness/mover enactment allows the audience to also witness the dynamic between dancer and guardian in which Authentic Movement's raison d'etre is brought into question. Shaun's movement will also be caught up in the amalgamation of the various appearances of witnessing, attending and performing that coalesce into a single event.

Soo Yeun You —The embodiment of Spirituality    

This research explores embodied perspectives on life and death through the intersections of Korean shamanism and Indigenous Australian traditional cultural views. Shamanism is perhaps the most ancient, and in both East and West, the most widespread of religious phenomena. It has often co-existed with other forms of magic, superstition and religion, so that a simple and discrete definition of its meaning and character is not easy. The philosophical views and cultic rituals known as shamanism have exercised a profound influence on the development of Korean attitudes and practices. This research investigates embodied ritual practices and the ways they inscribe physically, emotionally and affectively on ‘being’. It asks how is this understood and experienced as spirituality and how and for whom this is integral in every-day life.

Philipa Rothfield —Dancing as improvisation

This paper is an attempt to think of dancing per se as a mode of improvisation. It draws on the Nietzschean conception of the body as a momentary formation of forces which are found in relation to one another. Movement is the shift between these forces, the body’s becoming otherwise. Conceived in these terms, dancing could be posed as a kind of improvisation, the means by which the body avails itself of that which lies to hand. This may be the thrust of the floor, the forces of gravity, muscular readiness, the give and take of other bodies or the availability of training and technique in the body. Improvisation would then be another way of describing what occurs as the body becomes, from one moment to the next, otherwise.

Olivia Millard —Performing noticing, Using scores in dance improvisation

This presentation will explore the use of scores or verbal propositions in improvising dance. I will briefly cover some theory about scores and then look particularly at how I have used scores in my own improvisation practice. As well discussing what scores might be and might do, I will discuss how they could relate to the real time composition of dance in the present of its making. Among others, I will refer to the theory of Nelson Goodman, discuss the use of scores by various dance practitioners including Steve Paxton, and use ideas about feeling and consciousness from Antonio Damasio.

Alice Cummins —How do we speak about dancing?

Improvisational performance has always attracted me because of the agency of the performer, the transparency in the making and the philosophical considerations of all those involved.

This paper revisits my Masters thesis, hear her breath: a rhapsody of gravity, space and the body. How do we speak about what it is we do when making a dance? My artistic practice has been to differentiate what it is that I do that is distinctly feminine, not generically human. My research is a process of revealing this through performance and writing. The question saturates me – what is it I am performing?
This paper provides an introduction to a workshop exploring the conversation between the body, gravity and space. Both the paper and the workshop are an investigation of the moving body through a feminist lens.