Photo: by Katye Coe Photo: Chris Owen The Creative Act
Summer Dancing 2016
This year Summer Dancing unfolds as a story of linked gatherings. These are work spaces, workshops, performances, events and informal meetings.
We received a huge and brilliant response to the call for Summer Dancing 2016 and as such, Summer Dancing is the launch event of a year of curated experiences and gatherings.
Click here to see the full schedule with venue details
Saturday 18th June
13:00 to 19:00 with Hamish Macpherson
Alt Prepping is a monthly day-long practice in which participants structure the day in response to the idea of Alt Prepping – thinking about what kind of dance, choreographic, movement or aesthetic practices can we share, learn or devise to prepare for a future disaster. A future disaster could be catastrophic or mundane, it could be a thought experiment or a fiction or it could be truly practical.
It is a way to think about political models, resources and repertoires beyond traditional economic or philosophical paradigms.
Perhaps we are survivors assembling after the apocalypse. Perhaps we are an underground movement readying itself. Perhaps we are some privileged dancers.
The practice is rooted in dance practices but is open to anyone.
19:00 – 21:00 Visit to the Summer Dancing live archive and to have supper together there.
Lily Hayward-Smith and Jenna Hubbard will be reminiscing about previous Summer Dancing festivals across the weekend in a number of spaces and interventions. In advance of the festival, Lily and Jenna will collate an archive, including both tangible objects, mixed media and the archive within the body. Using their established process of improvisation from and with memories, Lily and Jenna invite festival participants to share in this process by telling stories, remembering and reconstructing moments from the festival’s past.
Sunday 19th June
09:00 – 13:00 with Emilyn Claid
Between You and Me Gather… talk… dance… eat… laugh…
Come and work with a simple score based on perception, affect, imagination, separateness and relatedness.
14:00 – 19:00 with Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Vanio Papadelli
Rounding up Comradeship’ is a practical workshop rooted in Contact Improvisation playing with notions of circularity through physical, sensorial explorations, and folk dancing. The circle and the sphere will be fluid frames that we can embody, deconstruct, and compose with; by linking the somatic to the physical to the social self. How do we ‘fill in the dots’ to perceive roundness in our bodies? How do we enter a circle and what remains after it dissolves? How do we deal with centre and periphery when we move or speak? Is there a potential for subversion? The workshop is addressed to dancers, movers and people with an interest in physical work.
19:30 – 20:00 a first screening of In Memoriam by Helen Poynor and Annie Pfingst
In Memoriam – an environmental dance film on the theme of loss. The most recent work in the collaboration between movement artist Helen Poynor and visual artist Anne Pfingst. In Memoriam was filmed over three seasons in Blackbury Camp, East Devon, a site that the artists have an ongoing relationship with.
Followed by a shared supper/ picnic.
Monday 20th June
09:00 – 12:00 with Lizzy Le Quesne
City Dance is a performance for public space and public participation: a participatory movement meditation – or movement ritual – to be performed in areas of urban commerce. It builds upon research work Lizzy did in 2015 with a group of student dancers from Coventry through a Making Space residency at Decoda. It offers an accessible and yet gently arresting intervention into a space of business, buying and passing. Enacting and encouraging slowing down, being and being with, listening to and through the body, it is a poetic and meditative softening in/of public space… as a collective process.
12:30 – 16:30 with Carolyn Roy
This afternoon is an invitation to explore dancing in companionship and being a companion as an invitation to dance. What does it mean and what does it take to open and accept the offer of companionship as we dance?
As part of this same Gathering story, these processes will also be at work;
Remote Second Wave
artists Doran George, Catherine Long and Florence Peake will be in a research process together across the 3 days of Summer Dancing. considering themes of remembering and considering. They may call us to witness their work intermittently and they will be working obliquely, in otherness and across continents. This research is part of a longer making process that will have different iterations throughout Decoda’s year of Gathering
Sherbourne Calling
Usha Mahenthiralingam will be in residence at the Ellen Terry building during the week leading up to Summer Dancing 2016 and into the weekend of the festival. This residency is part of an ongoing group of practices in Coventry. Nottingham artist Usha was inspired by the river, Coventry’s hidden river Sherborne in March 2016
She has chosen to gather to its calling each month responding and creating within the moment
More details about when you can join her will follow.
How you can join
Summer Dancing is a one fee festival this year at £25, whether you come for one day or all three. You are also welcome to offer more if your resources allow.
Participants can come and go across the three days but we emphasise that each experience is a complete one and we ask that no-one plans to arrive late or to leave early.
Decoda will prepare a simple breakfast as part of the festival invitation on Sunday and Monday and, similarly, a vegetarian supper on Saturday and Sunday. Do let us know if you have any particular requirements.
Booking
Festival attendance is £25 per person (+ £1.94 booking fee)
Please click here to book your place on our Event Brite page. Please also emailbookings@decoda-uk.org to indicate which events you would like to attend.