Ecologies of/de l' Architecture and/et Dance/de la danse

Description of Activity

Disrupting Architectural Drawing through Choreographic Practices
2-hour workshop – situated indoors /outdoors (weather dependent).

Facilitators: Belinda Mitchell (Interior Architecture, University of Portsmouth), Vicky Hunter (Site Dance, Bath Spa University), Virginia Farman (Site-specific choreography, University of Chichester)

This workshop draws on the collaborative explorations of three practitioners from, interior architecture, choreography, and site-specific dance exploring how embodied movement practice disrupts and enlivens architectural drawing and spatial design.
Informed by feminist new materialisms (Barad, Haraway, Braidotti), site-dance praxis and theory (Akinleye, Taylor, Brown), dance improvisation (De Spain, Duck, Midgelow), and architectural and spatial theory (Massey, Manning, Rendell) the workshop draws on iterative dialogues developed through the exploration of LiDar data collected from Wymering Manor - a sixteenth century house in Cosham, UK. Exploration of this data involved moving with scanned Lidar images taken from the site displayed within the walls of the University of Portsmouth’s CCIXR studios SmartStage.

Moving with the data combined with observation of the unfolding event involved embodied mark-making and drawing as a mode of embodied response in which the clean line of the architectural pen and roll of white paper is replaced by drawings/actions/movements that assemble and rearrange material relations, shifting the language of architecture from, boldness of design to the immensity of the ordinary and everyday. This collaborative process has led to research questions that inform the workshop design:
•How are bodies (of matter, movement, and material) entangled in this process?
•How does this movement practice produce ephemeral, mobile substantiations and fleeting contacts with surfaces, skeins, and materials?
•How does this work implicate drawing and dance in vulnerable constructions riddled with holes and vacuoles in which processes of collapse, decay, ruination, and preservation pervade?

The session includes:
1)An introductory overview of the facilitators’ praxis in relation to the conference themes.
2)A site-based movement and drawing session (for all abilities / levels of experience) in which participants will engage in movement tasks and short exercises to explore intrinsic relationships between bodies, environments and data in which bodies, objects, and place assemble.
3)A post-practice discussion and evaluation of the movement/drawing practice as a method of disrupting architectural drawing through bodily practice.

Period	27 Nov 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Ghent, BelgiumShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International