Choric Encounters: Performing the City
How might listening prosthetically become a politic for connectivity?
This panel explores the poetics of respons(ability) through work that performs the city through headphonic-led urban encounters.
Becca Wood, Carol Brown and Russell Scoones discuss a series of Auckland based headphonic test-events arising from their individual performance research that explores the pluralised potential of ‘bodies’ becoming together through instances of audio-based performance.
If our ability to come together is one of the most pressing issues of this milieu, this panel asks how we might create situations that foster new modes of interconnectedness and enable a receptivity to difference, the invisible and the lost?
Carol Brown questions how events of encounter might be conceived as ‘living rituals’ that activate an alternative ‘taking place’ through headphonic-led ambulatory performance.
Becca Wood discusses choreoauratics, a performance practice that prioritises listening prosthetically as a politic for recovery and attunement to the disappearing.
Russell Scoones discusses his experiences of harvesting and disseminating sound fields as part of urban choreographic encounters.
Historically, sound has presented a counter culture to the pervasiveness of visual culture. The acoustic order is subversive. If listening becomes a transversal act the panel asks how might we listen to the current cultural and political stasis creatively and ethically? How might we re-situate a networked public in the urban terrain?
Biographies:
Becca Wood works in performance practices that slip between the intersections of the body, space and digital environments. Becca is currently completing a PhD at The Auckland University where she also lectures in Dance Studies. Through her research and practice she presents work across the arts in performance, somatic research, writing, education, and digital-based art and spatial design.
Becca’s walk Social Choreography the ADA Symposium in Dunedin 2013 and her work Listening to Disappearing will be part of Saturday’s programmme.
Carol Brown is a choreographer, performer and Associate Professor in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland. Renowned for her trans-disciplinary collaborations, her work evolves through dialogue, experimentation and creative synergy. After completing a Phd at the University of Surrey, Carol went on to become Choreographer in Residence at the Place Theatre London. Her choreography has toured internationally and her writings on dance, space, technology and sexuality are published widely www.carolbrowndances.com
Russell Scoones
Russell Scoones is a Sound Artist and Composer. His sound scores are created from the environments, locations and rhythms of places and peoples. He composed the score for Carol Brown’s Aarero Stone, using stone, metal, glass and wood for the 2006 Wellington International Festival of the Arts at Te Papa. SLIP (2010) was composed for Touch Compass Dance Company using text and song to unravel the stories of the performers. His collaborations with the prize winning Carol Brown Dances disseminated his compositions throughout the world in festivals, theatres, film and TV. He has had a long association with music and disability in the UK and New Zealand. He currently works as a music therapist at the Auckland Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre, creates sound sculptures and installations and is a co-director of MAP Movement::Architecture::Performance.