Shoulder to Shoulder: Nurturing Solo Creative Practice Together
A workshop with Orrow Bell
Saturday 10th & Sunday 11th September 2022
10:30 - 17:00 on Saturday; 10:30 - 16:00 on Sunday
Temperance Hall, Penryn (32 Lower Market St, TR10 8BH)
Join a gathering of artists for a weekend of sharing and feeding your own creative practice, shaking your habits and diving into some fresh approaches.
Developing a solo practice for dance and movement making can be an enriching and yet also sometimes an isolating experience - this workshop looks to create a space for a playful, nurturing and inspiring being-alongside-ness as we delve into and deepen our own individual approaches.
Through a series of co-authored scores and invitations, we’ll swim through possibilities for improvisation, movement making, meaning making, reflection, writing and drawing. We’ll interrogate how a practice of respectful being-alongside can be physicalised. We’ll also dip into shared materials and the knowledge in the group. We’ll invite being seen and feeling keenly. We’ll play.
Each day will start with a warm up session of movement skills and somatic based practice which opens space for individual exploration. Starting with the breath, the core and opening the senses to find energetic connections through the body, the beginning of the day will suggest a development that echoes co-ordination patterning as we grow from the horizontal to the vertical. Time is given to listening and allowing sound into the body, to the repetition of functional and fluid floorwork units, to improvised moments and to expansive travelling, building imaginative complexity. Attention is given to momentum, awareness and individual discovery within the shared framework.
The workshop imagines solo practice as an ongoing question rather than as a known quantity. You don’t need to know what your practice is or might be, but rather come with curiosity to find out more. Professional dance and movement-based artists with burgeoning and established practices are warmly welcome.
Photo credit: Christa Holka
Orrow is a London based dance artist and producer. Their work encompasses making, performing, dramaturgy, facilitation, and curation. They enjoy slipperiness across embodiment, movement, language and queerness, their practice born of a binary-busting fervour. Their current DYCP-funded independent research centres trans creativity and care in dance. Orrow’s solo works have toured widely, including installation work TOMBO(Y)LA, commissioned by Wellcome Collection and theatre show The Forecast, which won a Total Theatre Award and was selected for the British Council and Surf The Wave showcases.
As well as their own work, Orrow has performed for Alessandro Sciarroni, Tino Sehgal, Hussein Chayalan & Damien Jalet, Lea Anderson, Charlotte Spencer, Maresa von Stockert and Chiara Frigo. Orrow was a Work Place Associate Artist at The Place, a Sadler’s Well’s Summer University Artist, writer for EU project Performing Gender and dramaturg for Charlotte Spencer’s Written in the Body and Livia Rita’s Futura Glitch. They teach and facilitate widely including leading the Next Choreography course at Siobhan Davies Studios and with queer collectives in Brazil for the British Council. Orrow is currently Artist Development Producer at The Place where they support artists to develop practice and make new work, and where they also curate Splayed, an international festival of queer performance and digital art.
FLAT FEE: £70
To book, email us on hownowcollective@gmail.com
TRANSPORT & ACCOMMODATION:
We want to connect and collaborate with dance artists based here in Cornwall, and also to welcome dance artists to join us from elsewhere: for us, Cornwall offers a particular quality of time and space to encourage reflection on past practices and to inspire future possibilities. On a practical note: Penryn is accessible by public transport (train). We can help by putting you in touch with potential lift-shares. If you need help with finding accommodation nearby, get in touch with us.
ACCESS:
The venue is wheelchair accessible.
OTHER INFO:
There are a number of food shops and cafes in Penryn, including a SPAR shop 2 minutes walk from the hall.