Poiesis: the work while it is happening

Collaborating as practitioners and theorists of dance, we propose to explore the productive potentialities of choreographic space, interrogating the latter as a site for the transformation of communities, mobilisation of individualities and politicisation of experiences. Charlotte Spencer and Jennifer-Lynn Crawford will discuss their new performance work Is this a Waste Land?, conceived for disused urban spaces. Part head-phoned audio, part live performance, ITAWL extends the possibilities of performance through a multi-modal register of engagement which delegates production to the audience. They will invite conference participants to engage conceptually and experientially with concerns of the work: How do we project our imagination into transformation if our physical experience is un-related to our immediate environment? How can we engage with the live present of our bodies rather than the habituated grooves of the past? Daniela Perazzo Domm will draw on the concept of poiesis as speculative and productive activity to examine the transformative possibilities of participatory choreographic practices in which movement and words intersect. She will suggest that, through the use of recorded sound and text, Spencer‘s audio-walks mobilise strategies through which space, time and memory are 'made‘, advocating a rethinking of how subjectivity and community are configured. Arabella Stanger will consider environments shaped through sabotage: a mode of performance residing in disruptions of spatial production. She will approach the issue of choreographic interventions into urban space by asking about relationships between community and environment that are forged not through collaboration, connection and mobility but through disturbance, disconnection and blockage.