dance = spatial practices = mind-full-body-environment
This research explores Place-making from the perspective of my choreographic dance practice in conversation with architectural and engineering practices. It continues my interest in narrating/understanding Place through starting with somatic experiences. While also asking how agency can be equitable across the entities that come together in the making of that Place.
Space+Dance+Digital, (S+D2)
Current research (2022 -on-going). Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of Augmented Reality (AR). AR allows the dance performance to be experienced, shared, and responded to through people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language, and social barriers. Link to page
Research Affiliate and Artist in Residence at MIT: Choreographing the City at MIT
My residency at MIT (2020 -2022) was hosted by Professor Gediminas Urbonas in the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT). I co-taught courses 4.314/4.315. The residency was supported by CAST.
Aim: to explore how research and creative collaboration between choreographic and spatial practices can help create new techniques, lexicons, and ways of consulting with community around urban design.
The project looks at how choreography (perceiving movement as a ‘four-dimensional language’) can contribute to larger discussions across subject areas that engage with movement in space and the Place-making that the experience of dance creates. At MIT, I looked at Urban design through the lens of capturing the corporeal and bodily experience of Place as a form of data. My project explored how the bodily experience and language of dance can add to engineering and architectural lexicons of Place as well as offer methods of communication for individuals living in urban communities. My starting questions included: Can we see a design as an organic, collaborative entity of people’s experience? What tools do urban designers and engineers have to understand how these spaces would work as movement systems? What tools do communities have to describe the experience of Being in the Places they live? My project investigated approaching Urban Design through a choreographic lens, dance as a language for the somatic experience of Being in Place. The research approached an offer of new ways to conceive of the measure of ‘Place’.
From the research in the first year, I developed an Emerging Lexicon, which informed my work in the second year. Residency MIT and Research Affiliate profile ACT, MIT .
Outcomes
Morning Conversations at MIT, podcasts created during the Autumn 2020
Choreographing the Campus, MIT – A series of short films using words from a lexicon I developed for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration across those interested in spatial practices. This lexicon was developed in part from reflecting on the language used in the eight podcasts created in the first part of the residency (Autumn 2020). The lexicon is the subject matter of my monograph, published by Theatrum Mundi Navigations: Scoring the Moment.
Below is a short ‘MIT Clips from the Classroom’ in which I am featured
Theatrum Mundi Research Fellowship – Phase Two (2020-21)
Navigations
Research during 2020 COVID-19 lockdown offered new ways to explore presence in Place. Particularly, how human form can be unrecognizable to digital algorithms, mirroring the absorption of self into environment that one can experience as a member of a city.
Outcomes
This phase of the fellow and my MIT residency led to the book Navigations: scoring the moment
Theatrum Mundi Research Fellowship – Phase One (2019 -20)
Choreographing the City: at/as the city limits
Phase One of my fellowship took a starting point from the paper ‘Choreographing the City: Can dance practice inform the engineering of sustainable urban environments?’ (Bingham-Hall & Cosgrave, 2019). Activity and events during my fellowship involved regular site visits to two architectural and engineering organizations working with city-scale projects, two week-long residency events where I worked with dancers, musicians, engineers, and architects to explore and exchange movement ideas, along with seven public events of performances, sharing workshops, and dance/talks. Link to Theatrum Mundi page
Outcomes
This pfirst part of my fellowship informed the book: Dance, Architecture and Engineering (Dance in Dialogue) Bloomsbury Publishers 2021
Related event at Whitechapel Gallery (June 2019): Learning environments: a discussion. Alternative, democratic and self-led education models, and the architectural responses associated with them, were the subject of this talk and panel discussion led by architects and academics Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler from Kingston School of Art. Guest speakers included Dr Catherine Burke, Reader in History of Education and Childhood, University of Cambridge; artist Nils Norman; Dr. Adesola Akinleye, dancer and PhD artist-scholar; and Sol Perez Martinez, PhD researcher at UCL, who all brought their research and practices around alternative pedagogies and the built environment into the conversation.
Below is the film of an event at the RA sharing some of my findings from the First fellowship with Theatrum Mundi