We’ve stayed in touch since our residency and performances with him in 2006 and have finally managed to co-ordinate dates. Andrew will be teaching a workshop in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Byron Bay. At the same time we will be rehearsing and performing with him in each location (except Byron Bay - at the moment).

If you’re interested in attending the workshop download the flyer. More details here soon.

ACIC is part of the CI36 celebrations happening around the world. it’s a Satellite Event and maybe there will be some media hook up while we’re there. martin hughes will be teaching at and attending CI36, which is great to see him being recognised by the global CI community. he has been so influential in the development of CI in Australia.

not sure if there are any tickets left, but it’s going to be a great time at ACIC… get in if you can.

a little snippet from the little con monster show from dc on Vimeo.

it was a crazy night - but very enjoyable.

that’s where we’re performing next. it’s in melbourne at Dancehouse from 7 - 9pm on Feb 29th, 2008.

from the blurb:

What happens when you bring together some of Australia’s finest contemporary dancers with some of Australia’s leading improvisers, contact and butoh practitioners: 5 spaces, 30 dancers - a lot of boxes and 2 hours to find out. Don’t miss the february little con. It’s a monster.

Friday 29th Feb, 7pm @ Dancehouse.
In February, The Little Con will be a special two-hour long curated and
scored improvisational dance event bringing together dancers working across
different contemporary forms. Audience members will be able to come and go
at their leisure, roaming freely about the upstairs space and are invited to become part of the performance by using cardboard boxes to divide and
redivide the space into three sections, creating separate and intimate
viewing environments.
Cost: $7 @ the door.

there’s a crazy excel spreadsheet detailing when and where everyone is performing that has had a few revisions and makes my eye water when i try to read it. here’s hoping that it all makes sense on the night.

video documentation to follow.

More info about the event.

Here is a version of Ready:

Also, an earlier work of David’s, called Always There, is screening on Nov 7 in LA as part of The Int’l Fest of Cinema and Technology. More details about this event

I don’t know if it got added to the official Melbourne Festival Musicircus website, but here is the blurb we wrote for our performance:

Whilst performing in Canberra last year David and Jacob overheard, in the foyer before the show, a lady and gentleman discussing the program notes. The gentleman suggested that the notes were pretentious intellectual dribble.

Our dribble for this installation project is as follows:
David and Jacob have been working for many years in the area of contemporary improvised performance. Our base physicality is a dance form called Contact Improvisation. We are interested in how meaning is created whether it is intentional or not. We enjoy performing with no explicit meaning intended and observing the feedback loop that is created through us, each other and the observers.

For this installation we have chosen the The Mobius strip as a metaphor for something simple, yet profound. If we were pushed to contextualise this installation we would probably point at current political, social and environment concerns and draw some analogy between them and a sense of oneness. We would do this to create a contemporary sense of meaning and connection.

To be honest we like the mobius strip because for us it has a sense of change, strangeness, continuity and inspires curiousity.

We hope you enjoy mobius as part of Musicircus.

It was quite an event. For us, it was a bit of a marathon. It took us 6 hours to complete the giant Mobius strip, which wound up and down and around the framework of the Fracture Gallery at BMW Edge. Then we slung some hammocks and made an attempt at having a snooze - which, with the amount of noise going on, and being suspended some distance from the ground, was not so straightforward. In fact, it was a little bit like having a very psychedelic dream.

We climbed into out hammocks at about 2.30am and climbed out at about 3.30am just as Die Roten Punkte were finishing a performance below us. Then we got ready to dismantle the whole thing, which started at 4.30am. By 4.36am we’d pulled all of the paper down and we then proceeded to de-rig and clean up and ended perfectly on time to watch the final moment at 5.20am.

A few pictures of the event from inside the glass.

following on from musicircus we will be performing at Al Wunder’s Feast of Improvisation at Cecil Street Studio in Fitzroy, Melbourne, starting at 8.30pm.

here’s the flyer.

The Little Con
Sunday 8th July, 6:30pm

Short, sweet and just plain good old fashioned dancing.
A monthly showcase of creative concoctions in improvisation.

Featuring (in any order you please):
• Michaela Pegum
• Shaun McLeod
• Al Wunder
• Paul Romano
• Special Mystery Guest

Cost: $5 @the door
Cecil Street Studio - 66 Cecil St, Fitzroy VIC 3065

–
THE LITTLE CON
A monthly confluence of conspicuous artists and their convivial congeries of confabulation.
Held every second sunday of the month.
2007: 11 Feb | 11 March | 8 April | 13 May | 10 June | 8 July | 12 Aug | 9 Sept | 14 Oct | 11 Nov | 9 Dec

E: littlecon@gmail.com

David is the ’special mystery guest’! ;)

You can join the little con email list by sending them an email using the link above.
Here’s the flyer:

this is an initial draft of material that David filmed, performed and edited. the brief for Jacob is simply to ‘respond’ to the footage to start a cyclic process of generating material. there is no end point, no theme, no explicit ideas to be explored. it is open ended and is a way of maintaining our duet practice and develop new work or foundations for new work in the future.

We’re looking at integrated conditioning, awareness and safety through Contact Improvisation and related forms.

Here is the original abstract, which is now changing as the session we are presenting is slightly different to the one we applied for:

Contact Improvisation (CI), as a practice form, has a focus on embodied kinaesthetic awareness and experiential learning. Through the development of, and increase in, three-dimensional open-ended pathways CI can allow dancers a greater awareness of their habitual movement patterns and, in turn, provide tools for shifting patterns of behaviour that have negative physiological outcomes.
The form uses elements of Newtonian natural philosophy (gravity, momentum, inertia, centripetal force, friction, resistance, weight and velocity, amongst others) in an ongoing investigation on the interactions between two or more dancers and the floor. In partnering work the form allows one to investigate the potential for alignment, and the harnessing of natural forces, to provide safe and extended weight bearing or lifting. That is, using an integrated awareness of alignment, habitual pathways and the potential for new pathways CI can condition the dancer to utilise more than simple muscular strength in weight bearing.
As a young and non-codified form (CI was established in the early 1970s and there is no accreditation for teaching) there has been interaction with related areas such as Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, martial arts, Tango and release-based techniques. CI can provide a useful training tool for dancers in any form and, through developing personal kinaesthetic awareness, extended proprioception and integrated alignment, it conditions the dancer’s body in safety.
We will present this work as an interactive forum through demonstrating particular techniques and with hands on experiential learning. There will be ample opportunity for discussion as well as direct knowledge transmission through movement.