Carol Brown | Victorian College of the Arts - University of Melbourne (original) (raw)
Papers by Carol Brown
This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore wha... more This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and embodied daily events. Conceived as spaces of encounter, dance-architectures aim to shift an understanding of two disciplinary fields from being object-centred (the making of a performance or a building) to being subject-centred (about relationships and interconnections between people). As a series 'Tongues of Stone' provides a means of giving voice to the unspeakable with each iteration responding to political events as well histories and mythologies of specific sites -- taking place over and over again.
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2011
ABSTRACT This article focuses on performance as a tool to reconsider the design and occupancy of ... more ABSTRACT This article focuses on performance as a tool to reconsider the design and occupancy of place. By appropriating the notion of gesture from the discipline of dance, we scru-tinize pervasive technology and its influence on the built environment. Increasing requirements for ...
Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Otago, 1985. Bibliography: leaves 11... more Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Otago, 1985. Bibliography: leaves 118-123.
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2013
ABSTRACT This co-authored score articulates the multiple elements of an arts-science collaboratio... more ABSTRACT This co-authored score articulates the multiple elements of an arts-science collaboration titled REVOLVE. Emerging from ongoing research into brain patterns, sleep/wake cycles and the sonic thresholds of binaural beats, REVOLVE creatively entwines data drawn from the rhythms of the body in sleep/wake cycles with sensor-based technology for synaesthetic performance. Premiered at the Body Festival, Christchurch New Zealand, 4–5 October 2011, REVOLVE brought audiences an intimate, multi-sensory encounter as performer Carol Brown improvised within the parameters of the score. The aim of this collaboration was to create a unique performance ecology, bringing together elements of the collaborators’ respective disciplines and expertise and experimenting within the areas of intersection. This is an example of a score used during the production process to sketch out the possible permutations of inter-action between movement improvisations, lighting, sound, video and wearable technology, and allows the multiple collaborators to have a shared reference. The textual dramaturgy sutured the different elements into a journey from the state of sleep to the state of wakefulness. More information about REVOLVE, including complete credits, can be found at www.adime.de/revolve.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2013
ABSTRACT What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a t... more ABSTRACT What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a time when the effects of environmental damage are becoming increasingly more visible and flooding our daily lives in unpredictable and sometimes devastating ways, how do qualitative methods of research and writing respond to current environmental challenges? This article discusses an arts-science-education collaboration titled fluid city, which disseminates critical research on water ecology to the wider public of Auckland City, New Zealand, through creative and performative means. An experimental approach to narrative washes through the style of this article in an attempt to have the encounter of reading flow with the logic of ecological thinking and liquid perception.
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2013
ABSTRACT As a post-performance reflection, this article addresses the complexities of a number of... more ABSTRACT As a post-performance reflection, this article addresses the complexities of a number of different issues surrounding the dramaturgies of art–science collaborations and the role of agency when spread across multiple collaborators. It includes comment from the voices – artistic, scientific and academic – involved in shaping Revolve from dusk to dawn and speculates on the impacts of the research and production. Revolve is an interactive performance inspired by sleep science (chronobiology); it was previewed as part of SEAM2011, 17–18 September 2011, at Critical Path in Sydney, premiered in Christchurch, New Zealand, during the Body Festival, 4–5 October 2011, and presented as a lecture performance during the Somatics and Technology 2012 Conference, University of Chichester, 23 June 2012.
A hybrid identity, as dancer-scholar, operating both inside and outside the academy, has in hinds... more A hybrid identity, as dancer-scholar, operating both inside and outside the academy, has in hindsight involved a somewhat messy and discontinuous tactical negotiation of different spheres of activity and understandings of what it means to be 'disciplined.' The construction of a choreographic 'world' through an emerging research process that combines somatic exploration, material construction, concepts, and scenographies seldom follows the sequence of disciplinary norms in the humanities and social sciences. Whereas to be an academic conventionally requires a thorough-going knowledge of one's discipline, its contexts and discourses, to survive as a contemporary artist requires a continuous practice and a reflexive process. Elizabeth Dempster's writing provokes and problematizes the identity of dance studies as a discipline within the academy. Writing from the perspective of an Australian dance scholar, she claims that "the disciplinary difference of dance practice and research has not yet been fully embraced and recognized" (Dempster 2005: 1).
This paper describes an arts-science collaborative project titled Standing Waves, which creativel... more This paper describes an arts-science collaborative project titled Standing Waves, which creatively entwines data drawn from the rhythms of the body in sleep/wake cycles with sensor-based technology for synaesthetic performance. The project partners situate their practice and research in the fields of choreography/dance, sleep science and media art and design. Our work explores how the non-literalness of scientific phenomena can be embodied in interactive performance and made meaningful for audiences. The aim of this collaboration is to create a unique performance ecology, by bringing together elements of the collaborators' respective disciplines and expertise and experimenting within the areas of intersection. The Standing Waves performance system involves wearable electronic sensor technology to allow a dancer to interact with a malleable sound environment. Sensing the body, its gestures, and its environment through the measurement of light and acceleration, the 'sensor suit' allows the dancer to intuitively control sound. In turn, the sonic feedback influences the emerging choreographic score, inducing constraints and generative cyclic patterns for movement. This feedback loop between movement and sonic state creates waves of sensation heightening the experience of the space as a perceptible field of embodied technology. The performance exists at the threshold between the figurative and the factual as it takes data and information from the lab practice of a sleep scientist and reinterprets this within the condition of a performance environment, effectively making visible the dynamic processes of subtle physiological phenomena.
How might narrative and ephemeral acts of performance open spaces for redefining the civic within... more How might narrative and ephemeral acts of performance open spaces for redefining the civic within postcolonial cities, acknowledging without appropriating the deep rivers of story and memory held in indigenous ontologies and perceptions? In acknowledging traumatic histories of place how can we avoid reinforcing binary categories like colonized and colonizer, victim and wrongdoer that tend to perpetuate fixed categories and feed into colonial guilt without offering alternative visions of the lived past and present future? How can we actively remember the past whilst inserting ourselves into the present?
Books by Carol Brown
As a choreographer, I am interested in making connections between bodies and environments, in mak... more As a choreographer, I am interested in making connections between bodies and environments, in making space speak through a dynamic exchange between dance and architecture, and in shifting audience expectations about how and where one might come to experience a dance. This writing
explores spatial practices in dance through an understanding of architecture as an inhabiting force within choreography.
This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore wha... more This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and embodied daily events. Conceived as spaces of encounter, dance-architectures aim to shift an understanding of two disciplinary fields from being object-centred (the making of a performance or a building) to being subject-centred (about relationships and interconnections between people). As a series 'Tongues of Stone' provides a means of giving voice to the unspeakable with each iteration responding to political events as well histories and mythologies of specific sites -- taking place over and over again.
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2011
ABSTRACT This article focuses on performance as a tool to reconsider the design and occupancy of ... more ABSTRACT This article focuses on performance as a tool to reconsider the design and occupancy of place. By appropriating the notion of gesture from the discipline of dance, we scru-tinize pervasive technology and its influence on the built environment. Increasing requirements for ...
Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Otago, 1985. Bibliography: leaves 11... more Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Otago, 1985. Bibliography: leaves 118-123.
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2013
ABSTRACT This co-authored score articulates the multiple elements of an arts-science collaboratio... more ABSTRACT This co-authored score articulates the multiple elements of an arts-science collaboration titled REVOLVE. Emerging from ongoing research into brain patterns, sleep/wake cycles and the sonic thresholds of binaural beats, REVOLVE creatively entwines data drawn from the rhythms of the body in sleep/wake cycles with sensor-based technology for synaesthetic performance. Premiered at the Body Festival, Christchurch New Zealand, 4–5 October 2011, REVOLVE brought audiences an intimate, multi-sensory encounter as performer Carol Brown improvised within the parameters of the score. The aim of this collaboration was to create a unique performance ecology, bringing together elements of the collaborators’ respective disciplines and expertise and experimenting within the areas of intersection. This is an example of a score used during the production process to sketch out the possible permutations of inter-action between movement improvisations, lighting, sound, video and wearable technology, and allows the multiple collaborators to have a shared reference. The textual dramaturgy sutured the different elements into a journey from the state of sleep to the state of wakefulness. More information about REVOLVE, including complete credits, can be found at www.adime.de/revolve.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2013
ABSTRACT What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a t... more ABSTRACT What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a time when the effects of environmental damage are becoming increasingly more visible and flooding our daily lives in unpredictable and sometimes devastating ways, how do qualitative methods of research and writing respond to current environmental challenges? This article discusses an arts-science-education collaboration titled fluid city, which disseminates critical research on water ecology to the wider public of Auckland City, New Zealand, through creative and performative means. An experimental approach to narrative washes through the style of this article in an attempt to have the encounter of reading flow with the logic of ecological thinking and liquid perception.
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2013
ABSTRACT As a post-performance reflection, this article addresses the complexities of a number of... more ABSTRACT As a post-performance reflection, this article addresses the complexities of a number of different issues surrounding the dramaturgies of art–science collaborations and the role of agency when spread across multiple collaborators. It includes comment from the voices – artistic, scientific and academic – involved in shaping Revolve from dusk to dawn and speculates on the impacts of the research and production. Revolve is an interactive performance inspired by sleep science (chronobiology); it was previewed as part of SEAM2011, 17–18 September 2011, at Critical Path in Sydney, premiered in Christchurch, New Zealand, during the Body Festival, 4–5 October 2011, and presented as a lecture performance during the Somatics and Technology 2012 Conference, University of Chichester, 23 June 2012.
A hybrid identity, as dancer-scholar, operating both inside and outside the academy, has in hinds... more A hybrid identity, as dancer-scholar, operating both inside and outside the academy, has in hindsight involved a somewhat messy and discontinuous tactical negotiation of different spheres of activity and understandings of what it means to be 'disciplined.' The construction of a choreographic 'world' through an emerging research process that combines somatic exploration, material construction, concepts, and scenographies seldom follows the sequence of disciplinary norms in the humanities and social sciences. Whereas to be an academic conventionally requires a thorough-going knowledge of one's discipline, its contexts and discourses, to survive as a contemporary artist requires a continuous practice and a reflexive process. Elizabeth Dempster's writing provokes and problematizes the identity of dance studies as a discipline within the academy. Writing from the perspective of an Australian dance scholar, she claims that "the disciplinary difference of dance practice and research has not yet been fully embraced and recognized" (Dempster 2005: 1).
This paper describes an arts-science collaborative project titled Standing Waves, which creativel... more This paper describes an arts-science collaborative project titled Standing Waves, which creatively entwines data drawn from the rhythms of the body in sleep/wake cycles with sensor-based technology for synaesthetic performance. The project partners situate their practice and research in the fields of choreography/dance, sleep science and media art and design. Our work explores how the non-literalness of scientific phenomena can be embodied in interactive performance and made meaningful for audiences. The aim of this collaboration is to create a unique performance ecology, by bringing together elements of the collaborators' respective disciplines and expertise and experimenting within the areas of intersection. The Standing Waves performance system involves wearable electronic sensor technology to allow a dancer to interact with a malleable sound environment. Sensing the body, its gestures, and its environment through the measurement of light and acceleration, the 'sensor suit' allows the dancer to intuitively control sound. In turn, the sonic feedback influences the emerging choreographic score, inducing constraints and generative cyclic patterns for movement. This feedback loop between movement and sonic state creates waves of sensation heightening the experience of the space as a perceptible field of embodied technology. The performance exists at the threshold between the figurative and the factual as it takes data and information from the lab practice of a sleep scientist and reinterprets this within the condition of a performance environment, effectively making visible the dynamic processes of subtle physiological phenomena.
How might narrative and ephemeral acts of performance open spaces for redefining the civic within... more How might narrative and ephemeral acts of performance open spaces for redefining the civic within postcolonial cities, acknowledging without appropriating the deep rivers of story and memory held in indigenous ontologies and perceptions? In acknowledging traumatic histories of place how can we avoid reinforcing binary categories like colonized and colonizer, victim and wrongdoer that tend to perpetuate fixed categories and feed into colonial guilt without offering alternative visions of the lived past and present future? How can we actively remember the past whilst inserting ourselves into the present?
As a choreographer, I am interested in making connections between bodies and environments, in mak... more As a choreographer, I am interested in making connections between bodies and environments, in making space speak through a dynamic exchange between dance and architecture, and in shifting audience expectations about how and where one might come to experience a dance. This writing
explores spatial practices in dance through an understanding of architecture as an inhabiting force within choreography.