Announcing our Research Room recipients for January-March 2025
Research Room Residencies give artists an opportunity to use the Research Room without any predetermined outcomes. Critical Path waives the venue hire fees for the room for successful recipients.
We are excited to announce our recipients for January, February and March 2025: Chloe Chignell, Eliza Cooper, Ira Ferris, Layla Meadows and Nuria Rodriguez Riestra.
CHLOE CHIGNELL
Shadow Text 2024, Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy, Photo by Rudy Carlier.
SUNCUT
SUNCUT is a research project on choreographic translation. Through studying experimental, feminist and queer translation practice I have come to understand translation as an artistic methodology that is preoccupied with understanding how signs and symbols can move between different semantic systems. In SUNCUT I think between movement—text and performance—publication. Translation is a practice of rewriting, or again-writing, departing entirely from any idea of singular authorship and mono-vocality. My research into and speculation on choreographic translation opens a noisy and messy speaking-with, moving across semantic registers. SUNCUT questions what choreographic translation can offer to movement research, authorship and dance readership. Through using translation I want to question more closely how choreography invites new bodily grammars gleaned from other textual forms.
https://www.chloechignell.com/
CHLOE CHIGNELL
NURIA RODRIGUEZ RIESTRA
Still from Nuria Font and Angels Margarit’s Solo per a habitació d´hotel, image courtesy of Nuria Rodriguez Riestra.
dancing architecture
Towards a curatorial project based on choreography-architecture connections, filtered through ideas of translation, writing and resistance.
Sparked by a curatorial project that included a programme of dance films interacting with interior spaces, by an interest in how to think about dance from the idea of embodied experience being inherently disruptive to control, and also by my somewhat disorderly and serendipitous reading and translating of Situationists, Georges Didi-Huberman, Andre Lepecki, Pedro G. Romero and Maria Garcia, I want to read and think about connections between architecture and dance, and about how it can be expressed in an impure curatorial language. I hope to record some readings and interviews, and use the beautiful Drill Hall and the bodies that inhabit it while I’m there as a pretext for writing and thinking and moving.
NURIA RODRIGUEZ RIESTRA
ELIZA COOPER
Bat Lake by Eliza Cooper, at Riverside Theatres, FORM Dance Projects, Photographer Dom O’Donnell
Contemporary Folk Dance Sessions
Eliza is researching British folk dances and developing choreographic materials based on their rhythms, structures and functions. In 2023, she undertook the Rapport international exchange residency, a partnership between Dance Makers Collective and South East Dance (Brighton UK). During the residency, she engaged with local folk dancers practicing Morris, Hornpipe, Clog/ Clocsio and Southern Step, musicians playing melodeon, concertina and fiddle, and craftsmen making bell pads and clogs. She is leading 2hr workshops at Critical Path sharing folk dances, folk-inspired contemporary exercises and choreographic applications. She is also working in the Drill Hall and Research Room.
ELIZA COOPER
IRA FERRIS
Critical Path history timeline by one of the artists.
Vignettes, flickers, fades …
Reminiscing on the 20 years of Critical Path, this memory project traces the significance of Critical Path through multi-sensory recalls of the dance community that has weaved its fabric and sculpted its form.
After spending a couple of months in the Critical Path research room, going through the physical archives of the past 20 years of Critical Path, I was left curious about the gaps – the anecdotal memories of the encounters, laughters, pathways, shapes, experiments that were housed here since 2005. What corners of the Drill Hall pulsate with recollections, which ones have been unattended to? What collaborations have been birthed here, which movement epiphanies released? What somatic sensations are imprinted in the embodied echoes of this place? This project unfolds through a series of one-on-one conversations with some of the artists who form part of Critical Path’s history. A memory questionnaire travels from Rushcutters Park to a hot spot in the Drill Hall, paying equal attention to that which is remembered and that which is forgotten or transformed into an utterance. Vignettes, flickers, fades, … These conversations will form the next edition of Critical Dialogues and a sound-installation at Critical Path’s birthday celebrations later this year.
IRA FERRIS
LAYLA MEADOWS
Layla Meadows, Jess Fitzpatrick and Oscar Jones Romeo, Theodicy, 2024, dance performance / art installation / music.
Nymphemeral
A universal theme of cicadas has fallen into our psyches.
A collaboration between art/performance/music and dance in situ. Cicadas as a manifestation of the cycles of life → the underworld, the nymph emergence, the shedding, the ephemeral existence/song of life, death ↻. The overlooked nature of their mysterious, gentle and healing existence – cicadas are the answer. Cicadas are innately magical and spiritual, however, weird and alien by appearance. The conversations among cicadas speak volumes about the interconnectedness of all living things. Together we will form a cohesive work that blurs the lines between our disciplines, by becoming vessels of the cicada truth (our truth). A pure form of Mother Nature showing us the way.
Collaboration between Layla Meadows, Jess Fitzpatrick and Oscar Jones Romeo.
LAYLA MEADOWS
Jess Fitzpatrick is an independent artist based in Eora (Sydney). She is currently studying visual art at SCA. Interested in intertwining and merging mediums with a focus on nature, performance and the self.
Oscar Jones Romeo is an independent musician based in Gulumada (Blue Mountains). He is inspired by his home in the blue mountains, bringing ideas of birds, insects and other sounds from the bush into the digital modular world. Merging electronic music and natural world.
Our work emphasises collaborative creation, bleeding different art forms, how can we be vessels for art together to create a world.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Still from Nuria Font and Angels Margarit’s Solo per a habitació d´hotel, image courtesy of Nuria Riestra Rodriguez. ID: Black and white still of a female figure behind a billowing curtain in a hotel room.