International Community for Movement

A Collective Breath

Online Event, 22 May 2021 from 12.00pm - 6.00pm BST

A day of virtual workshops co-curated by a team of recent graduates of the MA/MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching. This Zoom event was held across two spaces: a café and a studio. The café opened conversation between movement practitioners with varying experience and from wide ranging contexts. The studio held workshops by an international group of movement practitioners. Participants were invited to a collective warm-up in preparation for the day. All sessions featured BSL interpretation and live captioning.

The Workshops

Kate Kholer Amory – Breath

Kate Kholer Amory shared her somatic understanding of the body and led movers through exploring “what is going to happen as we emerge from this period of isolation, disconnect and perhaps illness and take those first steps into shared space and community? How will we track what has changed in our bodies?” Through inquiry and practice, Kate led participants to “explore employing three important fundamental principles of Somatic Movement: cellular respiration, support proceeds movement and yield proceeds push and reach.”

Kimberley Harvey & Dan Daw – Inclusivity and Movement

Kimberley Harvey led a movement session designed in collaboration with Dan Daw. Participants were led through different explorations and collectively learned repertoire from a previous Candoco Dance Company piece. Kimberley offered the idea of translation, translation of movement material in particular as universal, and offered a practical way to explore this.

Sumana Mandala & Coley Curry – Celebrating Movement Heritages

Sumana Mandala and Coley Curry drew upon Indian movement traditions to share embodied practice and then facilitated a session in which participants created “movement stories through dance and collage to honour our diverse lineages and lived histories, making waves of personal narratives in an ocean of possibility”.

Conservatoire Conversations on Movement

Online Event, Monthly from July- December 2021

These online conversations, hosted by Vanessa Ewan (Central) and Shona Morris (RADA), brought together those that teach movement in conservatoires to connect, share best practice, and talk productively about the implications of teaching movement through a pandemic. Support and inspiration were points of focus as practitioners navigated the complexity of hybrid teaching together. Those from other departments within the conservatoire were also welcome to join or listen into these conversations. This monthly gathering began in July of 2021 and continues in 2022.

Movement Dialogues

Online Event, 11 December 2021 from 3:00pm - 5:00pm GMT

A day of virtual workshops co-curated by a team of recent graduates of the MA/MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching. Practitioners were invited to consider ‘how critical conversations about equity and applications of the technology presently available might facilitate a development of movement practice’. This online event was held across two spaces: a virtual Reading Room hosted on the platform Gather and a live Zoom webinar. The webinar featured BSL interpretation and all offers were captioned.

The Experiences

Marie-Gabrielle Rotie - Audio Movement Journey

This audio journey, based within Butoh practice, was created by Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and brought attention to the self through embodied exploration. This guided practice invited participants to journey through the experiences of ‘blooming’ and ‘withering’. The recording lived within the Reading Room for a period of three weeks, inviting participants to enjoy this practice whenever they chose, to perhaps return to the exercises, and to discuss their experience with others.

Diane Alison-Mitchell, Kane Husbands, & Jennifer Jackson – A Conversation about Equity and Movement

This webinar conversation, chaired by Diane Alison-Mitchell, was a dialogue with movement directors Kane Husbands and Jennifer Jackson. These three discussed their current movement direction practices and the industry, applying the lenses of antiracist, decolonial, and anti-oppressive methodologies.

The Reading Room

The Reading Room was a virtual gathering space that offered participants the opportunity to read, explore movement, and discuss. For a period of three weeks, this space could be experienced individually or serve as a gathering place. The Reading Room contained a multimodal selection of resources, including: Marie-Gabrielle Rotie’s ‘Audio Movement Journey’; Dr. Cass Fleming and Dr. Roanna Mitchell’s articles from the 2020 ‘Against the Canon’ issue of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training; Diane Alison-Mitchell’s ‘Dancing since strapped to their mothers’ backs: movement directing on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s African Julius Caesar’ from Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard (2016); a video resource from Vanessa Ewan and Kate Sagovsky’s Laban’s Efforts in Action: A Handbook for Actors with Online Video Resources (2018); a chapter from Ayse Tashkiran’s book Movement Directors in Contemporary Theatre: Conversations on Craft titled ‘Beyond the Room: Contexts and Structures’; as well as links pointing to resources created by Jennifer Jackson, Kane Husbands, Tine Damborg, and Asha Jennings-Grant.

The ICM team offered participants orientation sessions and an access guide to this space.

Online Event: Conservatoire Conversations on Movement

September/October/November 2021

Vanessa Ewan (Central) and Shona Morris (RADA) would like to invite those that teach movement in conservatoires to the forthcoming ‘Conservatoire Conversations on Movement’.

Dates

• 6.30-7:45pm Thursday 30 September 
• 6.30-7.45pm Thursday 28 October 
• 6.30-7.45pm Thursday 25 November

About this event 

This is an opportunity for those of us who teach movement in conservatoires to connect, share best practice, and talk productively about the implications of teaching movement through a pandemic. We wish to utilise this time to support and inspire each other as we move through the complexity of hybrid teaching.  

We ran a series of three this Summer and following positive feedback we are continuing with them into the future.  

We have selected the last Thursday of each month as an easy to remember date and while they do occur monthly, there is no obligation to attend every month. We welcome you to one or several or all. They are simply for us, as conservatoire actor movement teachers, (or affiliated movement subjects of Fight or Dance) to dedicate considered time to discussion on areas that relate to teaching through the pandemic and to other areas as they emerge. 

We welcome those from other departments within the conservatoire if they would find it of value to simply listen in to the conversations themed on the adjustments we are making and solutions we have found while managing to maintain a Covid-19 safe environment in the studio. 

You can book a free place via the links below: 

Thursday 30 September 6.30pm 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-event-conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-169844660953 

Thursday 28 October 6.30pm 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-event-conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-169845661947 

Thursday 25 November 6.30pm 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-event-conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-169845776289 

Online Event: Conservatoire Conversations on Movement

July/August 2021

We would like to invite you to our forthcoming ‘Conservatoire Conversations on Movement’,  hosted by the International Community for Movement (ICM). This is an opportunity for those of us who teach movement in conservatoires to connect.

Dates

6.30-7.45pm Thursday 24 June

6.30-7.45pm Thursday 29 July

6.30-7:45pm Thursday 26 August

About this event

This is an opportunity for those of us who teach movement in conservatoires to connect, share best practice, and talk productively about the implications of teaching movement through a pandemic. We wish to utilise this time to support and inspire each other as we move through the complexity of hybrid teaching.

This is the first of three meetings to share our ideas and discoveries. We may find that we want to carry on into the future and make the last Thursday of each month a movement meet up for conservatoire movement teachers and dedicate considered time to other areas as they emerge.

The first meeting is themed on the adjustments we are making and solutions we have found while managing to maintain a Covid-19 safe environment in the studio.

You can book a free place via the links below:

Thursday 24 June

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-154403485983

Thursday 29 July

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-154404482965

Thursday 26 August

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conservatoire-conversations-on-movement-tickets-157604397997

A Collective Breath

22 May 2021 12.00pm - 6.00pm BST, online

A day of virtual workshops co curated by a team of recent graduates of the MA MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching. This Zoom event held two spaces, a café and a studio. The café opened conversation between movement practitioners with varying experience and from wide ranging contexts. Participants were invited to a collective warm-up in preparation for the day.

The Workshops:

Kate Kholer Amory – Breath

Kate shared her somatic understanding of the body and led movers through exploring ‘what is going to happen as we emerge from this period of isolation, disconnect and perhaps illness and take those first steps into shared space and community? How will we track what has changed in our bodies? Through inquiry and practice’ Kate led participants to ‘explore employing three important fundamental principles of Somatic Movement: cellular respiration, support proceeds movement and yield proceeds push and reach.” 

Kimberley Harvey & Dan Daw – Inclusivity and Movement

Kimberley Harvey led a movement session designed in collaboration with Dan Daw. Participants were led through different explorations and collectively learned repertoire from a previous Candoco Dance Company piece. Kimberley offered the idea of translation, translation of movement material in particular as universal, and offered a practical way to explore this.

Sumana Mandala & Coley Curry – Celebrating Movement Heritages

Sumana and Coley facilitated a session in which participants created ‘movement stories through dance and collage to honour our diverse lineages and lived histories, making waves of personal narratives in an ocean of possibility’.

More to enjoy in 2021: 

We look forward to continuing this conversation and to further examining what it is to be movement practitioners in this current moment. We plan to explore equity, future technologies, and more in our second event in 2021. In between events, we will offer a research space with related and relevant resources to continue conversations and consider how research might inform our practice. We eagerly look forward to connecting with folks in the months to come. 

Co researchers Rachel Nouchi and Ana Marambio presented a paper entitled Understanding Visual Art Through Movement at the Movement: Body Brain Cognition Conference at Oxford University on July 7^th 2017.

Viola Bruni MA Movement student connected through her acrobatics background to the sculptures and blogged about her experience of research.

June 2018 Art History Undisciplined at the Courtauld Institute. Joint conference presentation entitled’ Embodied Perspectives on Sculpture - A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Research’ by Dr Alexandra Gerstein, Vanessa Ewan and Ayse Tashkiran https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/art-history-undisciplined

Movement practitioners and neuroscientists gathered to discuss the connection between body and brain in a varied programme of science and arts-based presentations hosted by academics in the fields of neuroscience and movement provoking fascinating connections between the two fields.  

We were invited to share our research drawing on material gathered over a two-year period as part of a research initiative between the International Centre for Movement and The Courtauld Institute to look at the movement dynamics in Rodin’s work in support of the exhibition, Rodin and Dance, The Essence of Movement, at the Courtauld Gallery (20^thOctober 2016-January 22 2017).

Our research methods were developed using movement practices as a tool to deepen our understanding of the artworks in question; a collection of sculptures executed by Rodin towards the end of his life named posthumously as ‘Mouvements de Danse’ (1910-1915).

We wanted to find out how embodying the artwork through movement improvisation and physically drawing on paper, capturing moving bodies in a space, could deepen our understanding of what we were looking at. Using movement practices as a method of discovery led us to neuroscience and what it can offer the movement practitioner in terms of understanding the connections between movement, body and brain. ‘Artistic understanding always emerges from embodied simulation processes that incorporate the ongoing dynamics of brain, bodies and interaction with the world’ (Gibbs, 2013) clearly encapsulates our research process and what we were trying to achieve.

Compositional structures associated with creating art mirror many movement principles; space, weight, rhythm, balance, to name but a few, understanding such relationships through the discovery of Mirror Neurons’ (neurons that “mirror” the behaviour of the other, as though the observer were itself acting) and embodied simulation explain how the brain and body are fully engaged in this process. 

With this in mind, by instigating movement laboratories, we set up a series of movement and drawing tasks to capture live movement to better understand the movement information embedded in Rodin’s drawings and sculptures. During each laboratory, through the exploration of muscular efforts, alignment, rhythm and directional impetus found in Rodin’s work, we attempted to get closer to the movement he was presenting.  This in turn influenced the curator to create a gallery space where viewers could view exhibition through the eyes of movement.  As co researcher curator, Dr Alexandra Gerstein confirms: “Not only does each figure compress several movements into one form, but altogether the series could be said to operate a piece of theatre, with one figure enacting a sequence of loosely related actions which can be observed in real time.” 

Documentation suggests that Rodin’s models were in his studio for at least 3 hours moving freely.  His aim was to capture movement while they were moving– thus many drawings – almost 5,000 in total, came from capturing live movement. Our research confirmed that as well as his drawings showing motion, his sculptures were often precariously off balance. 

One of our earliest discoveries was to establish that many of the sculptures and drawing did not correspond to the laws of the human anatomy and such anomalies became increasingly revealing as we attempted to find the postures in our own bodies - at times, with minimal success. Many of the postures represented could only be reached with aid of support. For example, the movement research team used walls to balance against and props such as boxes and yoga squares.  It was only after a longer period that the more subtle postures revealed themselves.

There are many factors that come to play when considering what composes the movement including the pull of gravity, weight, balance and the lines of tension, activated throughout the body when seeking a pose. Some of the sculptures exude a line of tension that prove the sculptures to be off kilter and the leg suspended in the air, thus the very nature of being out of balance might suggest falling or moving into another position. We often found that by changing the orientation of the pose, as Rodin did with his own work, the dynamics of the sculpture/drawing could be more clearly understood or re imagined. 

We experimented at attempting to recreate the sculptures through isolating body parts given to individuals as separate tasks and regrouped as each person formed a human cluster that maybe moved  us closer towards the essence of some of the sculptures on display. Rodin had created these sculptures through assemblages of moulded and cast body parts (taken from two source models) and through our practices, we had arrived at the same realization as the curator but through an embodied route.

Through movement practice and historical research, we established that the sculptures’ positions did not hail from Yoga or Ballet practices as maybe we initially assumed. Whilst we used similar principles of flexibility and strength that come from Yoga, we applied such principles using different dynamics through the space. Thus evolved a preparatory warm up for action- an acrobatic limber as part of the process reflecting the postures. Such preparation exercises themselves allowed for further discovery and the curators witnessed similar movements echoed in the drawings that they had found in the archives, representing precise moments of our exploration.

It was only by interrogating the sculptures through a series of movement laboratories   over an extended period of time that we began to create a method of empathy and understanding directed to these specific works of art.We discovered that by moving our bodies in response to Rodin’s work with clear objectives, a deeper empathy or understanding of the artwork could be encountered and as such, an action-based agenda allowed us this experience.  This became further targeted with one member of the team facilitating, directing and offering feedback in response to movement tasks. With such clear, focused direction, our responses to the sculptures and drawings became increasingly lucid.  As Victor Gallese found in his research on mirror neurons: “In the case of the mirror neurons, what seems to matter most is that action must be goal orientated.” (Gallese 2010). 

The Rodin Project research accelerated this year and accompanied the exhibition Rodin and Dance; The essence of Movement Courtauld Gallery Autumn 2016-17 curated by Dr Alexander Gerstein. 

Four co-movement researchers shared aspects of our investigation with curators, movement directors and teachers, Central students, fine artists in a variety of settings. Our embodied findings were shared through movement workshops and sessions. 

These included:

• Contribution of movement analysis from Vanessa Ewan and Ayse Tashkiran to the Catalogue of the exhibition written by Dr Alexandra Gerstein.
• Twilight Movement session in the gallery – movement practitioners and movement research team undertook movement sessions in the presence of the sculptures during the exhibition in the Courtauld Gallery. Ana Marambio led yoga inspired forms tailored to incorporate binding, balances and extensions in the exhibition space with curators from the Courtauld. 
• December 2016 and January 2017 – we offered two movement workshops that used observation, warm up, learnt material in the form of a co-created port de bras, and movement principles extrapolated from the sculptures.  Participants were then invited to take that experience into a visit to the exhibition.
• January 2017 Study Day at the Courtauld - as well as presenting the research project at the Courtauld, we also created a site-specific performance with our movement discoveries. Vanessa and Ayse created a movement response in the gallery with co researchers, Ana Marambio, Rachel Nouchi and with the participation of MA/MFA Movement students. This was a short performance deploying material created out of the research and improvisation inspired by selected sculptures.
• We completed a short film synthesising the research in movement with the collaboration of Ken Mizutani from RCSSD TSD department.

Alongside hosting this series of workshops, the ICM began its first collaborative research project which combined a team of ICM movement practitioners (Vanessa Ewan, Ayse Tashkiran, Rachel Nouchi and Ana Marambio) with art curator Dr Alexandra Gerstein during preparation of an exhibition of Rodin sculptures entitled Rodin and Dance: the Essence of Movement  at the Courtauld Gallery Autumn 2016-17. Over a period of two years we undertook a series of physical explorations through movement, observation and drawing with a variety of movement students, movement professionals and curators. En route we made discoveries about the life model that collaborated with Rodin, the postures of the sculptures, the methods of construction and the drawings. We captured and shared our findings through a film, five practical workshops at RCSSD and at the Courtauld; the exhibition catalogue, the education pack, study day with curators in January 2017.

Please see the link for details.