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Turning Social Media into Creative Media

Turning Social Media into Creative Media

Today we ran our Turning Social Media into Creative Media workshop alongside the Plan d school of Dance, Barcelona with the help of Twitter, Skype and some great ideas!

 

‘Hoy, junto a Joumana Mourad dictando un workshop entre Barcelona y Londres en simultáneo..! IJAD Dance Company junto a Pland Centre de Dansa. Que buena experiencia!!!’ Juan Leiba

 

The collaberation between the two countries would not have been possible without the support of technology. And what we’re seeing is the potential of the use of technology to create artwork that is accessible. Creative director, Joumana is working with cross platform dance performers, aiming for the creation of transparency between virtual & real: ‘today we managed to incapsulate two countries and different groups of dancers in a bubble of time where sharing was crucial. I’m excited that we’re starting to explore the migration between physical spaces and virtual maps.

Thanks to everyone who made it today and look out for our next social media project!

Diary of a dancer: Sally Marie

Diary of a dancer: Sally Marie

‘So first rehearsal today. Joumana wants me to be beautiful, or at least to stand up straight and not be angst ridden and  overly dramatic! It was slightly a shock, yet an interesting challenge. So I put on my corps de ballet face and she looked a bit happier. Then she had me eating lots of peanuts whilst I danced, which apparently helped my jaw relax. I felt like Eliza Dolittle.

New people, new studios I thought as I walked into the O2 centre today. Love it. Robert was there. Smashing bloke. All swoosh and verve. And then Shanti, the costume designer came in to measure me and I spent the afternoon in a crinoline asking Robert at one point, ‘does my bum look big in this!?’

Its tricky because I feel entirely unable to give up the secrets of the present. Everyone else has. And its been something that has lead to big steps forward for the work. But I cannot and could not. And so this is the point of tension that we are working with just now. I told Joumana I felt awful about it, because I always want to be able to give everything. And yet I just cannot say these things. They are too much to let out into the air. They are the reason I often sob myself to sleep and wake up feeling sick. I simply could not say them.

Still I hope that I can say a great deal else in the show and talk of other people’s secret which are fascinating, funny and tragic in equal measure.

Anyway, ten days and counting and tomo we all meet for lunch time on our day of rest no rest. Can’t wait!’

 

Sally trained at Central School of Ballet and has since performed a great deal with Protein Dance, performing ‘B for Body,’ in the Place Prize final, as well as the following full-length touring production of ‘Dear Body.’ She recently completed a world tour of their critically acclaimed show, LOL.
Sally has also worked with Sean Tuan John, Jasmin Vardimon, Tilited Productions, Duckie at The Barbican, Deja Donne in Italy, Rajni Shah, Gary Stevens, Lulus’ Living Room, Frauke Requart, H2, and Ridiculussmuss at The National Theatre, as well more recently working at St Thomas’s hospital alongside the physios there, developing dance for children.
Her first group work ‘Dulce et Decorum’ was performed two years running at Spring Loaded, The Place and lead to her company Sweetshop Revolution and a newly created work entitled Tree. Other choreographic credits include The Extra, a solo performed at The Linbury, Royal Opera House, ‘Reasons to be Cheerful,’ a musical by Graeae at Theatre Royal Stratford, ‘Nerve,’ a play by Prestige Theatre Company and ‘Violet Smile,’ a short circus solo about a vampire waitress.
She has been twice voted Best Female performer by Dance Europe and twice nominated as Best Female Performer, as well as New Talent by the National Critics Dance Circle. 
Bio: Naomi Tadevossian

Bio: Naomi Tadevossian

Photograph by Roy Campbell-Moore

Naomi trained at London Contemporary Dance School, completing with a First Class BA Hons in Dance. She went on to join National Dance Company Wales as an apprentice dancer for a year and continue to go back to dance with the company as a Guest Artist; working with Christopher Bruce, Itzik Galili and Ohad Naharin, performing repertoire by Steven Petronio and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano and touring nationally and internationally to India and Belarus.
Naomi is currently also performing the principle role of The Spirit of the Vixen in Leos Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen with the Wales National Opera, directed by David Pountney. Over the next few months she is involved in The Bride and The Bachelors at Barbican Art Gallery, performing Cunningham repertoire re-staged by Jeannie Steele.

 
How are you involved in In-Finite?

I became involved with IJAD Dance Company’s In-Finite recently. I am an interactive performer in the process and am a secret holder and distributer. I am looking forward to creating personal relationships with anonymous, trusting participants, whilst having others observe this exchange. There is something very special about live dance, and proximity in which it happens… In-Finite will explore this personal relationship, which I find excites the performer and the audience.
 
What about your own secret?

All secrets are personal which is why they are a secret. Some are dark and others are humorous. It’s interesting to categorise secrets in accordance to what makes them a secret? My secret relates to a personal relationship, it deals with trust and lacking in trust. This has had a big impact on my relationship with important figures in my life. My secret can be saddening, but it deals with my personal development through such relationships.

 In-Finite comes to Rich Mix on 8th March 2013. For bookings click here.
Bio: Alice Gaspari

Bio: Alice Gaspari

Alice has been taking exams in ballet since she was 6. Alice trained in Italy, studying at the northern school of contemporary dance and winning her postgraduate diploma with Phoenix dance theatre. She is also training to be a yoga teacher.Recent projects include work with the choreographer Janine Harringhton (Millennium Bridge dance) in June 2012, Big Dance  at Opera Holland Park, organized by the English National Ballet, with Romanian choreographer Arcadie Rusu, projects with C-12 dance theatre and Era dance theatre.
 

‘As soon as we started working on secrets, from the very beginning at the audition, I thought it was the kind of project that I’d love to work on. Just the word secret brings so much – it’s scary, intriguing, it’s the unknown and yet it will always exist – it is infinite! Everyone has secrets, big or small or less important. Why is that? It’s fascinating.

I thought the project was a clever idea – especially being able to interact with the audience and the people following us online. It is an honour to be the instrument for other people to see their secrets taking shape, creating meaning and adding movement, but at the same time respecting their privacy and anonymity.

I always remember my best friend once told me ‘you’re unable to keep secrets…I can read it on your face…but I’m glad you always share them with me.’ She was right – I was unable to keep secrets for myself, but I was always sharing them with her, and her alone. Thinking about it now – I had secrets myself too, ones that I didn’t even share with my best friend. I was afraid of being judged, scared of the consequences. They felt too strong to be told, they could have influenced too much, too many people would have opinions about me.

So why do I love working with other peoples’ secrects? It’s not because I want to know everything about everyone or because I want to put myself into other people’s lives, it’s because I’m attracted by this huge world that seems to exist behind us all. Something my own experiences, my own secrets, my own confessions can only begin to relate to. Secrets are secret for a reason and I feel really honoured to be part of a project that tries to look into that world.’

In-Finite comes to Rich Mix on 8th March 2013. For bookings click here.
Bio: Reynir Hutber

Bio: Reynir Hutber

 
 
 
Reynir Hutber is a London-based artist working with emerging technology. Reynir is collaborating with IJAD as an ‘Experience Designer’, filmmaker and media researcher.

 

 

 

How would you best describe your work? 

‘I am a London based artist working with emerging technology. I combine performance and technology to create immersive installations that often invite the participation of the audience.’

 

What’s your role with IJAD?

I am collaborating with IJAD as an ‘Experience Designer’, filmmaker and media researcher.

 

What attracted you to In-Finite?

‘I was attracted by the opportunity to research and explore potential relationships between dance and technology. I was also interested in the way in which social media could be used as a tool to include people in the development of a performance.’

 

Tell us something about your secret…

‘Sometimes I find it amusing and other times frightening.’ Read more on Reynir’s work with IJAD and the In-Finite project in his post, Art and Technology. He also tweets: @reynirhutber

 

 
In-Finite comes to Rich Mix, London on 8th March. Bookings here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bio: Héléna Casari

Bio: Héléna Casari

Héléna began dancing at the age of 5 at the conservatoire of Cergy and went on to join the contemporary section of the Paris Conservatoire (director Mrs Moreno) where she was taught by Catherine Vesque and Sabine Ricou, ‘who really inspired me’. In London, she did her Bachelor in Dance Theatre at the Laban Conservatoire and regularly took part in the Laban’s Events, such as “Common Bodies in a Space of Difference” by Zoi Dimirtiou (tour in London and Athens), repertoire pieces (Scramble by Cunningham) and her own choreographies.
After a placement in the Carolyn Carlson dance company during the creation of her new work “Synchronicity”, Héléna joined the IJAD dance company as a dancer (December 2012). She tweets at @hlnac
 
Photo by Yves Kossi
 
 

What attracted you to In-Finite?

The way Joumana uses the self to connect the dancers and the audiance. I believe in this creation process. the self plays an integral part in human motivation, affect, and social identity and sharing a secret can change your self-perception and your relationship with others. So, it could totally interest everybody and have an impact beyond coming to see the performance.


What’s the most exciting part of the project?

First working on my secrets was really exciting but at the same time scary: How can you approach such a personal subject, it’s not something you want to spend time on, you just want to lock it somewhere and that’s it. The idea of showing my secret to an audience is scary I get afraid that somebody will get what it is and will judge me. But finally, when I saw all the other dancers and people on IJAD’s website sharing their secrets, I felt much more comfortable to realease my stress and feel OK to open myself to others. Being more comfortable with myself and my secret will end in me being much more tolerant with my past and my old choices.

I hope we can find the best way to make people feel comfortable to share their secrets and find use in this process and maybe even apply it to their future.

So what has sharing your own secret meant for you?

My secret started when I was a child I didn’t wanted to hurt my family and so I kept it to myself for a long time. Now as a young adult I realise that it had an impact on my life and maybe if I was able to share it in a more free way with people, my life would have been very different. Sometimes for family or society reasons or even my own self-conscious I have been ashamed of myself but now I just want to free myself and make a step forward, accepting my past. As a process it works beyond interpretations. It’s a very honest, intense, challenging experience.

In-Finite comes to Rich Mix on 8th March 2013. For bookings click here.

 

 

 

 

Performing secrets – the process

Performing secrets – the process

I set out choreographing for In-Finite by asking dancers to interpret their own secrets. We had lengthy discussions about the impact of a secret on our lives and the kinds of feelings we might be putting to movement. We talked about the experience of keeping a secret, the associated emotions, the overwhelming impact secrets can have on our daily lives and the possibility of forgetting a secret completely. What we didn’t talk about was the secrets themselves.

Because the word secret has taken pride of place for this project. We must have used it a million times by now, in rehearsals, in our online discussions, in our everyday chats. We’re twisting it round and turning it inside out and inspecting, exploring and interrogating it as inspirational tools and choreographic elements. But the word itself can only go so far. If words are signs then secret is the perfect word – it’s purely a symbol.  Any creative response to a symbol is going to be detached, to lack authenticity.

As we’ve been writing, talking, dancing and tweeting about secrets, it has become clear that it’s a pretty hush hush area. This area where me as a choreographer will not invade as a sign of respect to the dancers privacy; this hush hush area became problematic a stumbling block, as I was unable to push the choreography further.  There is a secrets comfort zone and no matter what you happen to be talking about, one major thing is true – you’ll not divulge the actual secret. The secret is the unsaid thing. The secret elephant in the room. We could talk for hours about the sheer devastation caused by a secret or about the empowered feelings of owning one – we’re happy to dance around it, explore the feelings related to it – but we’ll not word the secret itself. I worked with the dancers on their secrets but we worked on the associated feelings and the words surrounding the secret. Imagine 8 dancers in different parts of a room. Moving separately with their own secret, like satellites of secrets. In the first 2 weeks of rehearsals, not a single secret was told.

So I started to think about the ingredients needed to take the dance from a floating concept of individual journeys, to a collaboration.

Lou Cope, the dramaturg collaborating on this project, suggested what I think we’d all forgotten, our own secrets. While this part of the performance involved interpreting our own secrets, the next stage would be interpreting others. Lou was right, how could I ask my audiences to open up for the first time about something so deeply personal and not offer my end of the bargain. How could we expect engagement when we weren’t prepared to put ourselves on the line too?

What followed was perhaps the hardest part of this process, for all of us. As a choreographer I felt this tremendous burden – would my dancers be willing to share? What responsibility do I have towards them and the audience? Would I be willing to share my secret in return? This was last Thursday and the change to the rehearsing space was intense. I’ve always promoted transparency in our rehearsals and processes but this was more, we were equal, together. We all had secrets but instead of keeping them to the silent movement space in our areas of the room – we owned each others. We shared. As a result the movement became more vulnerable, more honest and less dramatised.  It was as if, in sharing our secrets, we’d reattached to honest emotions…

Now our job turns to the audiences and how far we share our secrets with them. As independent and personal a secret might be, sharing is not a one way street. If you’ve followed our progress over the last couple of weeks, you’ve seen us ask audiences for secrets. We’re now seeing how many people want to share but don’t quite feel able to. The word secret teases us, it gets us wondering what it might be like to not keep it a secret anymore, it tickles our need for truce. What does it take to put it into words?

Joumana Mourad is a Dancer, Choreographer and the Artistic Director at IJAD Dance Company. The In-Finite project comes to London on March 8th and tickets can be booked here. Joumana tweets at @JouDance.

The Digital in the Creative: a manifesto

The Digital in the Creative: a manifesto

COLLABORATE : CREATE : COMMUNICATE

IJAD Dance Company is getting people dancing.

Through workshops, performances and our projects we’re getting people in every country in the world to dance at one time as a statement of personal empowerment. We use contemporary dance as the main tool of its social mission to unlock a person’s creativity and empower them. Dance gets people healthy. It gets people together and it gets people unleashing the tremendous energy inside themselves.

So, what does technology have to do with this?

Technology interprets. Technology communicates. Technology is intrinsically creative.
Technology creates bridges.

Think of your favourite place.
You have a camera – how would you photograph it?
Just by thinking about this you’re using your creative self.
By taking that photograph you are comparing reality with your interpretation of it.
By sharing it you are trying to communicate your perspective of the world to other people.

As soon as your idea leaves your head others can interpret it and collaborate with you to turn it into something new. That’s how performances are made. The director has an idea they relate to the dancers. They relate to the sound designer, to costume, to lighting, to set, to props. All those people see the vision, work together and create something else. Something beautiful.

With In-Finite we’re doing this using secrets. We’re doing it with social media. During one of our workshops, Turning Social Media into Creative Media, we asked participants to think about their secret, to feel where it sits, to interpret it and express it through Twitter:

“Tentative, sliding, haltingly curious. Releasing and losing the fire all at once. #SMDTworkshop”

Without knowledge of the actual secret, we then explored that sentence, physically. We then reinterpret it with technology. Images are from workshops. You can see more on our website.

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ONE
Humans are always finding new ways to express themselves and to try to pass to others what they see.

Drawing, painting, sculpting, mapping, photographing, filming, tweeting, blogging…. the list goes on.

Creativity can be built on top of Technology. IJAD is leading the way with its experiments in using it in the creative process. We are sharing it with everyone. We are inviting everyone to experiment with us.

TWO
We think nothing of an instant message to a friend halfway round the planet telling them how nice this cheese sandwich is. Lets do more than that. Let’s show people in every country how we’re expressing ourselves in the deepest ways. We don’t just want to talk to them. We don’t just want to send them an image. We don’t just want to show them a film. We want to show them what we are doing – right now. And we want them to talkback – right now.

Let’s take this phenomenal juggernaut of digital possibility and do something empowering. Let’s share our heritage, our countries and our culture. Let’s present our talented performers, our striking venues and our passionate audiences. And let’s see what can be shared back.

As artists we are responsible for getting the word out about they way we interpret what it is like to be human. So lets do that. With technology – with tools already integrated into our lives Powerfully. Globally.

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How are we doing this?

Sensography
Ever filmed a school play or your favourite band? Not quite the same as being there is it? We’re changing that. We’re experimenting with performers and developing methods for them to interact with the audience at the other end of the camera as well as the other end of the room.

This is exciting. This is new. We’re reaching out to touch an audience who isn’t in front of us. Our content comes from our audiences around the world in ways it couldn’t before, and we’re interpreting it using technology. Collaborating with dancers using technology and sending our work around the world, using technology.

In creating a production we use movement and story but that isn’t performance. The art of performance is how we communicate it in ways which have the most impact and the most meaning. We do this through connecting with vast numbers of people and affecting them deeply. This is the art of IJAD. This is the art of technology.

We’re building a pick-up-and-play tool-kit for venues and artists to share what they’re doing using technology – without the headache of too many platforms and not enough know-how.

We’re running workshops with students of dance to give them vital understanding of the digital world in dance practice.

We’re running workshops with the public to find out how they are using media in their everyday lives and how they express their ideas using technology and dance

We’re changing audiences.

Not only are we invigorating established dance enthusiasts, we’re drawing in a whole new generation – we’re speaking in ways already integrated into society. Think about the X Factor. Do you think people watching dim the lights and watch passively? No. They invite their mates over and gossip, they tweet to their friends, they share images of the show on facebook, they download the ringtones and they broadcast their views to the world.

We are not saying the format of current performance is bad, we’re saying, let’s create multiple ways of enjoying it for multiple people. Let’s allow people to gossip, tweet, share, follow and comment on a performance and share with each other other how it’s being done. Let’s give people permission to talk to us. To each other. Everywhere.

In this way we’re allowing people to interpret our content in the way they want to. We are also connecting them with other people experiencing it around the globe – what better way to share culture, ideas and understanding?

Technology belongs in the performance world.