This one day workshop is suitable for professional and advanced-level performers and performance makers with an interest in movement. Participants will explore their physicality through creative tasks and guided improvisation taking touch and partner work as their starting points.  By listening to ourselves, each other and the spaces we inhabit, we will explore textural stimulus as away of enriching our practice.  A series of tasks will be used to develop our sensitivity to one another and the space around us, opening up new stimulus for generating material and the collaborative process. 



Biographies:

Luke Pell is an artist/producer who makes performance. Often working collaboratively with other artists whose practices reach beyond disciplinary definition. Alone his work focuses on relationships, between people and places, bringing our attention to fleeting moments that sometimes pass unseen. Using autobiography and the body as beginnings for exploring intimate human experience, he works with text, touch and light to develop visual poetries and emotive environments where thoughts and bodies shift between the ordinary and the ethereal. Together their works have been presented outdoors, site specifically in unique buildings or as installation, offering audiences the opportunity to encounter performance in unexpected spaces.

He has worked with David Harradine (Fevered Sleep) on performances for theatre spaces and Athina Valha on her epic site-specific project Spaces Between as part of the re-opening of Royal Festival Hall in London. He collaborated with choreographer Marc Brew to create Nocturne an outdoor dance work for Greenwich and Docklands International Festival and Liberty Festival in Trafalgar Square, which went on to tour outdoor festivals across England. Most recently he worked as Producer for Shobana Jeyasingh’s Counterpoint at Somerset House on the Strand. He is currently working on a series of Intimate Encounters In A Certain Light, featuring Waits and Marginalia for A Phantom Library as well as research for an installation Embers with interdisciplinary artist Catherine Long.

Luke lectures and teaches in disability, dance and the body in performance across the UK. He is Module Convenor of Inclusive Practice for The Royal Academy of Dance’s Masters in Teaching Dance and works with Candoco Dance Company as Head of Learning and Development.

Rachel Gomme is an artist working in performance and installation, making often quiet, minimal work that focuses on time and process as experienced in the body of both performer and viewer. In durational performance and installation her work often centres around experiences commonly perceived in terms of absence or lack, asking what might be present in such spaces. She is interested in the immediate moment of performance, and to what extent it is possible to create a shared space of experience between performer and viewer. Rachel has presented her work, taught and performed widely throughout the UK and internationally, as well as collaborating with a range of artists and choreographers including Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Philipp Gehmacher, Gary Stevens and the Strange Names Collective.