The word ‘research’ is in vogue amongst dancers, choreographers and performance makers. Perhaps the number of dancers and choreographers completing practice-as-research degrees is related to the large number of business cards that say: choreographer | artist | researcher. The underlying assumption about these “artist-scholars” could be that choreographic research strengthens the quality of their creative work.

In this workshop, Efrosini Protopapa and Simon Ellis will propose a range of practical and reflective activities designed to test the possibilities and limitations of choreographic research. What types of artistic research are there? How might research be useful? What are the strategies or tools of the researcher? How do choreographic practices change as a result of research? What’s worth ignoring or resisting?

Participants should be prepared to move, think, reflect, talk, listen and question

About Simon Ellis and Efrosini Protopapa
Simon Ellis is a New Zealand born independent performance maker and performer with a broad practice founded on choreographic traditions. He has a practice-led PhD (investigating improvisation, remembering, documentation and liveness) and is currently senior lecturer in dance at Roehampton University in London where he specialises in practice-led research methods. His choreographies have included site-specific investigations, screendance, installation, webart, and conventional black box works. In 2008 his solo performance Gertrud was a finalist in the Place Prize, and his screendance project Anamnesis was awarded Best Film at InShadow International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology in Portugal. www.skellis.net

Efrosini Protopapa is a Greek choreographer, writer and teacher based in London since 2002, and currently works as a Lecturer in Dance and Choreography at the University of Surrey, Department of Dance, Film and Theatre. Previously, she has also taught at Laban, Roehampton University, the Central School of Speech and Drama and Coventry University in the UK, as well as the University of Peloponnese in Greece.

Efrosini is the artistic director of the performance group Lapsus Corpi, and has choreographed work for theatres and non-traditional performance spaces in various cities in the UK, as well as Athens, Utrecht and Berlin. She has been Resident Artist at Dance4, Nottingham, and was awarded the Bonnie Bird New Choreography Award 2008. Most recently, she has also been commissioned by Laban (2007 and 2010) and Coventry University (2009) to create works for student groups that toured in the UK. Alongside these projects, she has collaborated as a research assistant, scenographer and/or performer with artists such as Gill Clarke, Carol Brown and Ivana Müller.

27/02/2012

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