RESEARCH ROOM RESIDENCY GUESTS: Jessyka Watson-Galbraith, Steve Heather and Siegmar Zacharias invite you to come and get activated, involved, share and be a part from the very beginning of ‘Super! Power! – The Rock Opera’. A Making of the making of a Rock Opera. We are making a DIY Rock Opera that addresses questions of democracy, collectivity and processes of group formation within our community, YOUTUBE and performance. One classic rock song from The Understated Brown (aka TUB). One dance video. This is what we start with. The rest of the material is produced by you and YouTube practitioners. Be the beginning of our rockin’ snowball effect. We want to meet you at the beginning of our weeks at Critical Path. To present to you ourselves, our ideas and approaches on this topic and then invite you to exchange and engage in creating over our stay a series of filmic and sonic events, in the studio, at home, at work, on the beach and in the stars.

Jessyka Watson-Galbraith is a choreographer who has been using YouTube as a tool in her process to develop choreography.
www.letstalkaboutloveproject.blogspot.com

Steve Heather is a musician, composer, sound designer and drummer from The Understated Brown with whom along with Siegmar co-founded the performance group SXS Enterprise.

Siegmar Zacharias is a theatre director who has developed several YouTube lectures performances under the title: Democracy! Fuck Yeah! It's not a social movement. It's a dance which directly deals with YouTube phenomena and how the medium of YouTube has affected politics and performance.

www.sxsenterprise.com
www.myspace.com/steveheather
www.myspace.com/theunderstatedbrown

You can follow the project at; www.superpower-therockopera.blogpot.com
Enquires Helen Martin projects(at)criticalpath.org.au

CHOREOGRAPHIC RESIDENCY EXCHANGE. January 7 to February 5  Critical Paths first guest Susanne Martin from  Master of Arts - Solo/Dance/Authorship program (SODA) at the Universitat der Kunste Berlin. Will be working at Critical Path in January and February 2009.

Susanne says: “during my stay in Sydney I want to work on my solo Rosi tanzt Rosi. I'm dealing in it with the notion of narration in solo dance, narration in Improvisation, with aging, the female solo as 20 century's dance, mask work, character work. I want to have a couple of work in progress showings and have some practice based research days with interested colleagues on these subjects.” Susanne Martin’s main artistic directions are contemporary, improvisational dance and theatre.

Since 1990 she has created 4 full evening group pieces, 6 solos and danced and created collaboratively as well as under the direction of Dieter Heitkamp, Jess Curtis, Vivienne Newport, Frauke Havemann, Roberto Lun, Isabelle Fuchs, Bronja Novak. As Improviser she performed in festivals, conferences, performance events in Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Freiburg, Potsdam, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Orvieto, Bari, Stockholm and Copenhagen.

NSW ARTISTS
2009 Responsive Projects
January To March
Onsite At The Drill Hall, Critical Path

LIZZIE THOMSON & JANE MCKERNAN
Responsive Program – Jan 12 to Feb 8
Lizzie Thomson and Jane McKernan will undertake a four-week research project, inquiring into the development of our respective solo practices, with a particular focus on deepening our individual choreographic process. The departure point for this research is our mutual interest in the relationship between the practice of pure movement inquiry and contemporary performance practices. We are interested in exploring a choreographic method that approaches abstract dance choreography, but which also makes use of theatrical and narrative ideas to place the dancing body within a specific context. Our collaborative research into dance began in 1982 when we began studying ballet together at the Dell Brady Ballet School in Canberra. Since then our artistic journeys have run remarkably parallel tracks. We have a great knowledge of each other’s work, and feel we can meet in a place which can encompass new terrain for us both. We will work alongside each other generating solo material on ourselves, in order to broaden our sense of creation and to establish a supportive and safe infrastructure where we can appropriate, collide, assimilate or reinterpret each other’s dance histories and work.

VICTORIA HUNT
Responsive Program – 19 January - 8 February and 6 April to 10 April
Research Room - Feb 9 – 15 and April 20 to May 9
100 Cloaks: Gone Before Dawn
‘te aho tapu’, weaving the first row, binding the tangible with intangible, in the constant flux between night, earth, sky and whakapapa (lineage). A Cloak carries within it the mana (strength) of our ancestors and celebrates the interconnections that give life to material forms. This residency will explore the dance of 100 Cloaks, tapping into the distant and ever-moving presence of Maori heritage located within an Australian-born experience. Transformative body is the defining principle, steered by underlying Body Weather and Butoh sensibilities: to be danced by the space.

ANGELA HILL
Responsive Program – February 15 to February 22
Angela Hill will be using an interactive system as a framework for researching processes of creating duet and quartet material in collaboration with dancers Tamarah Tossey, Ryuichi Fujimura, Kimberley McIntyre and Imogen Cranna.  A two camera video tracking system developed by André Hayter will generate data from movement in three planes which will be processed through Isadora to create sounds.  I am particularly interested in exploring possible connections between verbal and non-verbal communication, spatial relationships and consonant/dissonant soundscapes. 
We will test out various improvisational scores based on recorded conversations amongst the dancers and by using Laban’s defence scale for spatial guidelines in the layering of duet relationships into a quartet structure.  As we explore the patterns of space/communication/sound dynamics within the interactive system, we hope to answer several questions.  Can the common thread of basic communication be processed through interactive technology to reveal a discernable link between human conversation and spatial/tonal harmony?  And more simply, can choreography influence technology and vice versa?  We will be using various entry points in this feedback loop to experiment with different channels of exploration. 

LINDA LUKE
Fellowship Program- one day a week between February 15 and May 24.
Throughout her 3 month fellowship residency, Linda will begin to research for THIRTEEN, a new solo dance piece. THIRTEEN will look at the situation of ‘homeless’ teenagers –teenagers living in isolation from their families. This is an open investigation regarding what is considered a home (when the family home isn’t an option), what it takes to survive, what becomes necessity and what subtle gifts are born from necessity. Linda will draw from her history of Bodyweather and performance making practice to create this work. From a choreographic perspective, she is interested in deepening her investigation in the meeting between three key inter-connecting methods that essentially builds the choreography in her practice – construction, improvisation and image or ‘sensitivity’ work. This project is supported by Critical Path and The Weather Exchange.

Margie Medlin
Director, Critical Path