www.skellis.net/booth

Dear All

Some brief news about some things I'm involved in over the coming months ...

1. Booth: A Dance Fair

Booth: A Dance Fair has been commissioned by The Place and Bloomberg SPACE as part of COMMA40. I've been working with Amy Watson and Heather Caruso to develop six dance booths: Solo, Social, Photo, Video, Talk and Lecture. The project includes work by (among others) Rosemary Lee, Katrina McPherson & Simon McPherson, Becky Edmunds, Lucy Cash, Doug Rosenberg, Stephanie Jordan, Erica Stanton, Bloom!, Luca Silvestrini, Dianne Reid, David Corbet, Mårten Spångberg, Sherril Dodds and Eva Recacha, plus I'll be having a bit of a groove (think Patsy Cline, Chuck Berry, KC and the Sunshine Band ...). Friday 25 November 2011, 11am to 2.30pm, Bloomberg SPACE, London EC2A 1HD (free). Details at skellis.net/booth and further information about COMMA40 at theplace.org.uk/11403/whats-on/simon-ellis-luca-silvestrini-filipe-alcada-darren-ellis-dance-on-film.html

 

2. Recovery

Recovery (alias, the never-ending project) has another set of legs (and they are very exciting), and the team – Nat Cursio, Shannon Bott, Pete Brundle, Ben Cobham (Bluebottle), Ben Cisterne and Byron Scullin – are currently inhabiting the rehearsal space at Napier St in Melbourne. I'm doing a bit of 'directing from a distance' and we'll pick up some more time in March 2012. A première is not far off (but I've written this before).

 

3. Colin, Simon & I

Colin Poole and I spent two weeks bookending the summer in Choreodrome (The Place's biennial choreographic research project) and Colin, Simon & I is close to being ready to present. We showed 10 minutes in Touch Wood and are currently meeting to continue the project's development. On Wednesday 11 January 2012 @ 6pm, we'll present a pre-première of the work at Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton as part of Roehampton Dance's Dance Diary programme. We'll then première the work (proper) at The Place in Spring 2012. During the project's development and rehearsal we've had timely input(s) from Bob Whalley, Lee Miller, Chris Bannerman and Amy Watson. www.colinsimonandi.com

 

4. I think not

In late August I traveled to Findhorn, Scotland to participate in Deborah Hay's Solo Performance Commissioning Project. I've wanted to participate in the SPCP for some time, and have long been inspired by artists such as Ros Warby, Rachel Krische, Atlanta Eke and Joe Moran who have worked with Deborah. Deborah developed a solo I think not which she taught us, and since then I've been practicing it daily in order to première the work next year. At this stage I'll be showing my adaptation of Deborah's choreography in Leicester, UK on 8 March 2012, and then again in Auckland, NZ in the week leading up to Good Friday (day to be confirmed). I'll also be presenting the work in London sometime in late February, and will look to show it off (never could words be more wrong) in Melbourne when I am there in the Antipodean Autumn. Details and research blog at skellis.net/spcp. Thanks again to everyone who commissioned the project – my singing may mean you wished you hadn't.

 

Lastly, I'm in Melbourne and Auckland in March and April for a number of projects and workshops, and hope to catch up with my Australian and Kiwi dancing friends.

That's it for now.

All the very best, Simon

Twitter: @simonkellis

Blog: http://skellis.posterous.com

COMMA40: THE PLACE
19 - 27 NOVEMBER

COMMA is a dynamic series of commissions enabling artists to experiment and expand their practice in relation to the particular nature of Bloomberg SPACE.

For COMMA40, ground-breaking artists from The Place, will populate the gallery with creative research, evolving installations and impromptu performances.

Click HERE for listings: http://www.theplace.org.uk/634/whats-on/listings.html

OPENING HOURS
Mon - Sat, 11am - 6pm

FREE ADMISSION
NEAREST STATIONS
Moorgate & Liverpool St.

Bloomberg SPACE
50 Finsbury Square
London EC2A 1HD
www.bloombergspace.com

Flyer: http://cl.ly/3n2d390d1Y110x1p123v:

I follow the blogs and social networking updates of a number of teachers around the world. They inspire me and and ask current and difficult questions about teaching and learning, often whilst willingly sharing ideas for working with students. Often these ideas are about attempting to make teaching and learning environments that give students the best possible chances of developing their voices – creative spaces that inspire, challenge, and help us to question our assumptions about the things we think we understand, and the things we might like to understand.

One such teacher – whom I have never met – is Shelley Wright, who teachers at secondary school level in Moose Jaw (which could only ever be the name of a place in Canada). At face value, our teaching practices have nothing in common: secondary versus tertiary, science vs (very) liberal arts, either side of the Atlantic pond ...

And yet Shelley's direct and very personal writing about her experiences of working with the students in Moose Jaw (just wanted to write that again) is provocative, inspiring and filled with possibilities for working with people who are curious about learning and ideas.

http://shelleywright.wordpress.com/

Thanks Shelley.

 

I was shocked by this story – but perhaps not surprised.

"Do you want people on the internet to see you crying?" She was shocked when the student immediately stopped crying. She didn't need to say another word. She didn't think it would make that much of a difference but it did. Later the 8 year old came to her and said, "Did you erase the part where I was crying?"

http://ideasandthoughts.org/2011/10/19/even-8-year-olds-get-it/

For some time I've been working with various kinds of blogs as part of my teaching and learning work. These have ranged from student-led blogs, summatively assessed individual blogs, group blogs, and module summary blogs. This year I've focused on two of these: module blogs that act as a hub for students to keep track of their activities and work, be nourished, check in with timetabling etc. I am using self-hosted Wordpress blogs for these (e.g. http://skellis.net/ed/dpar/autumn2011 and http://skellis.net/ed/choreography/resourceful2011/).

The University of Roehampton – like many universities – uses Moodle as their online resource system for student communication and module details (Blackboard is the other major player). Although Moodle seems to work just fine, I believe it fails on two levels: 1. ease of use; 2. e-portfolios. There is no comparison between Mahara (Moodle's e-portfolio software/application) and a blogging platform like Posterous. Not only does Posterous look good, it is easy to use (although not as easy as it used to be before it became Spaces – which has been confusing to my students), handles video content with ease (try embedding anything other than YouTube clips in Mahara), and is brilliant for uploading images (cf Mahara which forces users to resize images manually – something well beyond the technical know-how of most (?) undergraduate and postgraduate students).

I've also started to lean towards having group run Posterous sites for small groups within modules (2-3 students). These encourage conversations and experimenting with writing styles, testing ideas and thoughts with peers, responding to class reading, photo-based tasks etc. I'd love to hear from some of my students here about your experiences of working with these blogs ...

Perhaps the most critical part of building Wordpress (or other) module-based blogs is that they allow for potential students to obtain detailed insight into the nature of particular modules, as well as inviting other members of the (in this case, dance) community to see what kind of work goes on here at Roehampton Dance. This builds a sense of sharing and communication across Universities that is at odds with consumer-capitalist models of tertiary education that promote working in isolation, competition, and a terrible mis-trust of the potential of sharing resources and ideas.

I'm involved with a group of artists selected by The Place in London for a new initiative called Work Place. We met for the first time (socially) back in July, but this weeked we are having a two and a half day intensive that is being facilitated by Fiona Lesley from the Map Consortium. We've been working with and against small provocations designed to get us thinking, reflecting, and wondering about our roles as (dance) artists in the 'here and now'.

Today I was thinking a lot about my autonomy as a choreographer (amongst other things), and the choices I make that lead me down particular pathways that aren't necessarily ones I want to pursue. This tension – between getting work 'out there', and noticing what might be best for the work I am interested in developing – remains difficult.

I'll write some more after the weekend is over, but we also had a fleeting visit by David Jebb (Joint Artistic Director of Battersea Arts Centre) who said (beautifully): "stay vulnerable".

 

I've started doing dance technique classes again. This is the first time I've done classes regularly since about about 2002. It is also the first time I've learned Limón technique.

My doing classes is all part of a system that Erica Stanton has implemented at Roehampton Dance whereby two teachers experience each other's work, and in so doing are able to build on that work. For example, Erica is teaching Limón classes to (final year) undergrad students, and I am simply participating in these classes. I don't really add anything from a teaching perspective, but I do gather a lot of insight into how the students work, and how they are experiencing these materials. It's revealing (inevitably), and I get to experience first hand how they are coping with the materials, what is clear, what isn't, and how each of the students is approaching the work.

After 7 weeks, I start teaching the class – but I'll be working with improvisation strategies – and Erica becomes the dancer with the students. My teaching improvisation is an important part of Erica's plan – that each of the practitioners involved in teaching these 'shared' classes develops ideas and exercises that respond to their current interests/practice.

But this is not what this post is about.

In just under ten years since I was last doing daily class, I've done a lot of dancing, a lot of running (and a lot of cooking), but I have also turned 40 and this body is not the same as it was as a 33 year old. In the first of Erica's classes, I was worried about 'subjecting myself' to the physical movements 'prescribed' by another, but this didn't prove to be such a concern. What was difficult was, first of all, the concern that I'd no longer be able to pick up materials/exercises as I used to be able to. Second, and more frightening, was my experience of loss: mobility, strength, facility, and my capacity to actually get my body to particular locations in space on time. I know this is a common experience for dancers as they age, but not doing daily class for so long had hidden this gradual loss, and my gentle confrontation with Erica's Limón class provided plenty of evidence.

Like seeing an friend for the first time in a long time. We both know we are different, but we say things like "you haven't changed a bit". Well, I have changed and this decay is not easy.

Image courtesy of Boriana Pandova
Performance of Bagryana Popov's "He is not here", Sofia, January 2011

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

– Umberto Eco

via Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris <http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html>

I've started work on a project that involves (in part) searching through some old VHS tapes mostly from the very early 1980s. This was not long after my father – Ian Graham Ellis – had bought a portapak style JVC video camera (consisting of a large handheld camera connected to a shoulder-pack that housed the VHS tape). Among taped TV shows and documentaries*, I stumbled across this footage of me practicing tennis down the end of our street in Masterton, New Zealand. I reckon I was 11 or 12 years old, and this wall was my home away from home – Dad and I even painted a tennis net on it, as well as a service line on the road itself. Any tennis aficionados out there will note the semi-western forehand grip (I suspect I was mimicking the legendary Bjorn Borg who played with a full western grip) which was coached out of me ... and my forehand never recovered.

* Truth be told, there was a LOT of footage of me practicing tennis. Sorry Dad.