Bronwyn Preece | University of Huddersfield (original) (raw)
Papers by Bronwyn Preece
Peripeti, 2022
Two performers. Two women. Two slips. Two streaks of white paint. Two cameras. Two portraits ... more Two performers. Two women. Two slips. Two streaks of white paint. Two cameras. Two portraits [of self] from Two countries, across One border, under One new moon.
Commencing in June 2021, at the exact appointed time of the dark moon (be it in the wee hours of the morning, or mid-way through a class we are teaching), collaborators Bronwyn Preece (British Columbia, Canada) and Rosemary Candelario (Texas, United States) each take a black and white portrait selfie of themselves. They each wear an identical white dress and don a single white streak of butoh paint somewhere on their bodies.
They are loosely holding and responding to the overarching question ‘what am i/we birthing?’
The two women then each screenshot the GPS compass coordinates of where they happen to be at that moment. They instantly email both the photo and coordinates to the other, who immediately creates a haiku in response, which they then send back.
This trans-national poetic-photographic exchange is a year-long, durational project –- (currently ongoing, June 2021-June 2022) – over fourteen moons – with the cumulative goal to create a multi-media performance space built from the images and words collected, within which the two will perform together, in person …
A simple frame.
And an evocative premise through which we will reflect in these Artist Pages – mid-project – on how we relate it (or not) to developing sustainable performance-creation processes …
Oregon Historical Quarterly, 2015
Jacket2, 2022
An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lor... more An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lori Landau, Carolyn Roy, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Michele Minnick, Denise Leto, moira williams, Catherine Fairfield, andrea haenggi and bull thistle leaf, DJ Lee, Megan Kaminski, Charli Brissey, Bronwyn Preece, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Rania Lee Khalil, and Madeline Kerslake. This montage essay assembles participant writings from the symposium along with original workshop descriptions, attendant responses, and practitioner biographies. Each person wrote about a workshop not their own, letting themselves drift with the particular echoes of the sensations and politics each session activated. My hope is that this archive allows you to gather a flavor of the wide scope of ecosomatic labor today, of work on the edges of immersion and criticality.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2015
CSPA Q31, 2021
This is a piece from the Eco-Somatics special-themed edition of The CSPA's (Center for Sustainabl... more This is a piece from the Eco-Somatics special-themed edition of The CSPA's (Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) Quarterly #31.
![Research paper thumbnail of body inking : butoh : [a poetic narrative] … artist pages](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/60367361/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 2019
The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in t... more The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in these artist pages. The author poetically captures the process of engaging in the 22nd annual Kokoro Dance Theatre Society’s Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive: a 9-day in-studio period, followed by 3 outdoor performances: on the shores and in the waters of Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific Ocean. Preece captures the days in a poem, synthesizing felt experience with elements of the daily choreography and context, offering palpable, personal and sensual tellings of one woman moving through process, practice and performance. Although specific, the poems remain accessible – interpretable and relatable to the reader—as fresh offerings, as movements themselves.
The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media, 2018
Due to a mutation in one of my genes, I (self-) identify as a (dis)abled woman.
Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, 2018
This post is to direct you to my chapter in the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (edited ... more This post is to direct you to my chapter in the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (edited by Rosemary Candelario and Bruce Baird). The chapter contains a series of 12 poems documenting my immersive experience as a participant in Kokoro Dance Theatre Society's 2016 Annual Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Please access book from your university library and find it here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Butoh-Performance/Baird-Candelario/p/book/9781138691094
I had the honour to guest-edit a special-themed journal issue for the CSPA (Center for Sustainabl... more I had the honour to guest-edit a special-themed journal issue for the CSPA (Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) titled 'dis/sustain/ability'...I include here the short introductory editorial I wrote...the full issue is available here: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1374151
From: Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, 2017
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it still make a sound? The follo... more If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it still make a sound? The following is a co-written, transnational 'falling' project between Jess Allen (UK) and Bronwyn Preece (Canada). A book chapter.
Sol • Sticed ABSTRACT … sunrise… 7:13a.m.… light… shadow… birdsong… alarm clock… lunar rhythms… s... more Sol • Sticed ABSTRACT … sunrise… 7:13a.m.… light… shadow… birdsong… alarm clock… lunar rhythms… solar spectrums… reveal(s)… bark… branch… waking disclosure… douglas fir resonance…. perceptions… temporal tugs… skin… bone… touching touch… 8:02a.m.… arbutus prisms… invisible draws… captured… cedar moments… fleeting… 3:57a.m. … 'to listen to the forest is also, primordially, to feel oneself listened to by the forest, just as to gaze at the surrounding forest is to feel oneself exposed and visible, to feel oneself watched by the forest' 1 … 5:11a.m.… solstice… chiasmic prism… transparent striations… climatic metronomes… captured lichen… f-stop automated… global mover… motion caught… sunset… 5:58p.m.…equinox… breathing breath….visible… durationally wrapped… pine… witnessed witnessers… 7:31p.m.… apple orchard… sidewalk heaver… night… seasonal pulsing… concrete cruncher… 8:12p.m.… reciprocal arborealographers….
Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance, 2015
Keywords: butoh, site-specific performance and dance, poetic enquiry, performative writing, ecolo... more Keywords: butoh, site-specific performance and dance, poetic enquiry, performative writing, ecological performance, reflexive phenomenology
Abstract: [stories]… conjugating butoh … go, how? … creviced articulations of (academic) bodies morphing … a corporeal text … a table of contents of the poetic performa-tive … performing poet … an exegesis of arriving : humbled leavings … nuanced sea/landscape … evocations of site … of dance … word waves … always questioning … white sandy grit (in teeth and crotch : … poetic scholarship) … verbing …
'full:new' was a transnational score for a site-based Authentic Movement (AM) and ecopoetic writ... more 'full:new' was a transnational score for a site-based Authentic Movement (AM) and ecopoetic writing practice, performed for the duration of a complete lunar phase: two women (one in Wales, the other in Canada) moving/writing authentically on their respective sites for 28 minutes every day, for 28 consecutive days. The process led to the creation of a collaborative, concrete poem: the length of each line waxing and waning daily with the moon. In an adaptation of the 'classic' form of AM, the mover-witness dyad was stretched into a virtual arc across the northern hemisphere, held within the witnessing circle of the moon's cycle: 'witnessing' thus took the form of a remote, reciprocal commitment to self, site and other, through a strict adherence to the score. In these artist pages, we offer a reflective poetic-photographic documentation of this practice, with an accompanying written commentary on the role of AM within this process: how can the authentically moving body, transnationally witnessed, become a resonant organ both for sensing ecological relations and writing them into being?
A performer's poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that ... more A performer's poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that butoh (re)presented for me…on this day, in and for that moment. Penned immediately following three consecutive day, outdoor events, these words capture my body-as-participant in Kokoro Dance's 19th Annual Wreck Beach performances, Vancouver, Canada (July 2014). The poems chart the subtle fluidity and changing landscape – internally/externally – of each fresh performance. Performing in the waters of British Columbia's west coast was particularly resonant following the Fukushima disaster (directly relating 'our' butoh back to its origins as a response to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – and these poems capture in their essence one woman's quest to understand and relate to the built and the meltdown of 'environment' through a somat-ically, embodied ecological perspective. Embedded and woven through these lines are references specific to choreographic elements of the piece, the location, the timing and/or local Indigenous Musqueam legends….from the Argentina vs. Germany World cup, to the sand dunes, to Xe-ls, the Creator… their imbrication enlivens the congruency of what was birthed on the beach, and the particulars are designed to conflate our understanding of the potency (and urgency) demanded of our/this place and time. My poetry is movement, simultaneously holding within its lexicon a tension between understanding, applicability, the local and the universal. My poetry is a butoh dance open to your interpretation. I offer it as a gift….
The co-authored (with Jess Allen), editorial from the special-themed issues, two volume edition o... more The co-authored (with Jess Allen), editorial from the special-themed issues, two volume edition of 'Performing Ethos' journal titled: 'Performing Ecos' (Vol. 4.2 and Vol. 5.1&5.2)
A piece features the slow and growing activist gestures of the trans-national collaborative proje... more A piece features the slow and growing activist gestures of the trans-national collaborative project: The Trans-Plantable Living Room -- an outdoor, edible performance venue -- which served as a platform to examine local gardening as a possible metre for global climate change. Short article in the Gestural Notes portion of the Contemporary Theatre Review's Issue about 'Gesture, Theatricality, and Protest.'
The Tsk Tsk Revue has become an annual one-night event—perhaps now more accurately described as a... more The Tsk Tsk Revue has become an annual one-night event—perhaps now more accurately described as a phenomenon—in the 350-peopled, entirely off-the-grid island of Lasqueti, BC, developing into a Gulf islands’ touring show. Teeming with brazen backwoods humour and localized, alternatively-powered erotics, the Tsk Tsk Revue has rightfully earned a unique place on the national burlesque scene. The show spins both the term sexy and the status quo on their heads, highlighting the often-absurd moments of choosing to live off-the-grid and translating the many challenges that face the islanders into comedic fodder. Staging innovative low-tech stage tropes, costumes, and black light burlesque through a series of vignettes strung together by the colourful commentary of the show’s creator and hostess, Jenny Vester, the Tsk Tsk Revue continually pushes the limits and tests one remote little island’s limits.
This is a chapter from the recently released book: 'Performing Motherhood' from Demeter Press (20... more This is a chapter from the recently released book: 'Performing Motherhood' from Demeter Press (2014).
Peripeti, 2022
Two performers. Two women. Two slips. Two streaks of white paint. Two cameras. Two portraits ... more Two performers. Two women. Two slips. Two streaks of white paint. Two cameras. Two portraits [of self] from Two countries, across One border, under One new moon.
Commencing in June 2021, at the exact appointed time of the dark moon (be it in the wee hours of the morning, or mid-way through a class we are teaching), collaborators Bronwyn Preece (British Columbia, Canada) and Rosemary Candelario (Texas, United States) each take a black and white portrait selfie of themselves. They each wear an identical white dress and don a single white streak of butoh paint somewhere on their bodies.
They are loosely holding and responding to the overarching question ‘what am i/we birthing?’
The two women then each screenshot the GPS compass coordinates of where they happen to be at that moment. They instantly email both the photo and coordinates to the other, who immediately creates a haiku in response, which they then send back.
This trans-national poetic-photographic exchange is a year-long, durational project –- (currently ongoing, June 2021-June 2022) – over fourteen moons – with the cumulative goal to create a multi-media performance space built from the images and words collected, within which the two will perform together, in person …
A simple frame.
And an evocative premise through which we will reflect in these Artist Pages – mid-project – on how we relate it (or not) to developing sustainable performance-creation processes …
Oregon Historical Quarterly, 2015
Jacket2, 2022
An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lor... more An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lori Landau, Carolyn Roy, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Michele Minnick, Denise Leto, moira williams, Catherine Fairfield, andrea haenggi and bull thistle leaf, DJ Lee, Megan Kaminski, Charli Brissey, Bronwyn Preece, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Rania Lee Khalil, and Madeline Kerslake. This montage essay assembles participant writings from the symposium along with original workshop descriptions, attendant responses, and practitioner biographies. Each person wrote about a workshop not their own, letting themselves drift with the particular echoes of the sensations and politics each session activated. My hope is that this archive allows you to gather a flavor of the wide scope of ecosomatic labor today, of work on the edges of immersion and criticality.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2015
CSPA Q31, 2021
This is a piece from the Eco-Somatics special-themed edition of The CSPA's (Center for Sustainabl... more This is a piece from the Eco-Somatics special-themed edition of The CSPA's (Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) Quarterly #31.
Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 2019
The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in t... more The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in these artist pages. The author poetically captures the process of engaging in the 22nd annual Kokoro Dance Theatre Society’s Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive: a 9-day in-studio period, followed by 3 outdoor performances: on the shores and in the waters of Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific Ocean. Preece captures the days in a poem, synthesizing felt experience with elements of the daily choreography and context, offering palpable, personal and sensual tellings of one woman moving through process, practice and performance. Although specific, the poems remain accessible – interpretable and relatable to the reader—as fresh offerings, as movements themselves.
The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media, 2018
Due to a mutation in one of my genes, I (self-) identify as a (dis)abled woman.
Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, 2018
This post is to direct you to my chapter in the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (edited ... more This post is to direct you to my chapter in the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (edited by Rosemary Candelario and Bruce Baird). The chapter contains a series of 12 poems documenting my immersive experience as a participant in Kokoro Dance Theatre Society's 2016 Annual Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Please access book from your university library and find it here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Butoh-Performance/Baird-Candelario/p/book/9781138691094
I had the honour to guest-edit a special-themed journal issue for the CSPA (Center for Sustainabl... more I had the honour to guest-edit a special-themed journal issue for the CSPA (Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) titled 'dis/sustain/ability'...I include here the short introductory editorial I wrote...the full issue is available here: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1374151
From: Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, 2017
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it still make a sound? The follo... more If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it still make a sound? The following is a co-written, transnational 'falling' project between Jess Allen (UK) and Bronwyn Preece (Canada). A book chapter.
Sol • Sticed ABSTRACT … sunrise… 7:13a.m.… light… shadow… birdsong… alarm clock… lunar rhythms… s... more Sol • Sticed ABSTRACT … sunrise… 7:13a.m.… light… shadow… birdsong… alarm clock… lunar rhythms… solar spectrums… reveal(s)… bark… branch… waking disclosure… douglas fir resonance…. perceptions… temporal tugs… skin… bone… touching touch… 8:02a.m.… arbutus prisms… invisible draws… captured… cedar moments… fleeting… 3:57a.m. … 'to listen to the forest is also, primordially, to feel oneself listened to by the forest, just as to gaze at the surrounding forest is to feel oneself exposed and visible, to feel oneself watched by the forest' 1 … 5:11a.m.… solstice… chiasmic prism… transparent striations… climatic metronomes… captured lichen… f-stop automated… global mover… motion caught… sunset… 5:58p.m.…equinox… breathing breath….visible… durationally wrapped… pine… witnessed witnessers… 7:31p.m.… apple orchard… sidewalk heaver… night… seasonal pulsing… concrete cruncher… 8:12p.m.… reciprocal arborealographers….
Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance, 2015
Keywords: butoh, site-specific performance and dance, poetic enquiry, performative writing, ecolo... more Keywords: butoh, site-specific performance and dance, poetic enquiry, performative writing, ecological performance, reflexive phenomenology
Abstract: [stories]… conjugating butoh … go, how? … creviced articulations of (academic) bodies morphing … a corporeal text … a table of contents of the poetic performa-tive … performing poet … an exegesis of arriving : humbled leavings … nuanced sea/landscape … evocations of site … of dance … word waves … always questioning … white sandy grit (in teeth and crotch : … poetic scholarship) … verbing …
'full:new' was a transnational score for a site-based Authentic Movement (AM) and ecopoetic writ... more 'full:new' was a transnational score for a site-based Authentic Movement (AM) and ecopoetic writing practice, performed for the duration of a complete lunar phase: two women (one in Wales, the other in Canada) moving/writing authentically on their respective sites for 28 minutes every day, for 28 consecutive days. The process led to the creation of a collaborative, concrete poem: the length of each line waxing and waning daily with the moon. In an adaptation of the 'classic' form of AM, the mover-witness dyad was stretched into a virtual arc across the northern hemisphere, held within the witnessing circle of the moon's cycle: 'witnessing' thus took the form of a remote, reciprocal commitment to self, site and other, through a strict adherence to the score. In these artist pages, we offer a reflective poetic-photographic documentation of this practice, with an accompanying written commentary on the role of AM within this process: how can the authentically moving body, transnationally witnessed, become a resonant organ both for sensing ecological relations and writing them into being?
A performer's poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that ... more A performer's poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that butoh (re)presented for me…on this day, in and for that moment. Penned immediately following three consecutive day, outdoor events, these words capture my body-as-participant in Kokoro Dance's 19th Annual Wreck Beach performances, Vancouver, Canada (July 2014). The poems chart the subtle fluidity and changing landscape – internally/externally – of each fresh performance. Performing in the waters of British Columbia's west coast was particularly resonant following the Fukushima disaster (directly relating 'our' butoh back to its origins as a response to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – and these poems capture in their essence one woman's quest to understand and relate to the built and the meltdown of 'environment' through a somat-ically, embodied ecological perspective. Embedded and woven through these lines are references specific to choreographic elements of the piece, the location, the timing and/or local Indigenous Musqueam legends….from the Argentina vs. Germany World cup, to the sand dunes, to Xe-ls, the Creator… their imbrication enlivens the congruency of what was birthed on the beach, and the particulars are designed to conflate our understanding of the potency (and urgency) demanded of our/this place and time. My poetry is movement, simultaneously holding within its lexicon a tension between understanding, applicability, the local and the universal. My poetry is a butoh dance open to your interpretation. I offer it as a gift….
The co-authored (with Jess Allen), editorial from the special-themed issues, two volume edition o... more The co-authored (with Jess Allen), editorial from the special-themed issues, two volume edition of 'Performing Ethos' journal titled: 'Performing Ecos' (Vol. 4.2 and Vol. 5.1&5.2)
A piece features the slow and growing activist gestures of the trans-national collaborative proje... more A piece features the slow and growing activist gestures of the trans-national collaborative project: The Trans-Plantable Living Room -- an outdoor, edible performance venue -- which served as a platform to examine local gardening as a possible metre for global climate change. Short article in the Gestural Notes portion of the Contemporary Theatre Review's Issue about 'Gesture, Theatricality, and Protest.'
The Tsk Tsk Revue has become an annual one-night event—perhaps now more accurately described as a... more The Tsk Tsk Revue has become an annual one-night event—perhaps now more accurately described as a phenomenon—in the 350-peopled, entirely off-the-grid island of Lasqueti, BC, developing into a Gulf islands’ touring show. Teeming with brazen backwoods humour and localized, alternatively-powered erotics, the Tsk Tsk Revue has rightfully earned a unique place on the national burlesque scene. The show spins both the term sexy and the status quo on their heads, highlighting the often-absurd moments of choosing to live off-the-grid and translating the many challenges that face the islanders into comedic fodder. Staging innovative low-tech stage tropes, costumes, and black light burlesque through a series of vignettes strung together by the colourful commentary of the show’s creator and hostess, Jenny Vester, the Tsk Tsk Revue continually pushes the limits and tests one remote little island’s limits.
This is a chapter from the recently released book: 'Performing Motherhood' from Demeter Press (20... more This is a chapter from the recently released book: 'Performing Motherhood' from Demeter Press (2014).
“Trans-cultural, trans-national, trans-species histories in performance,” American Society for Theatre Researchers Conference, 2012
Primary author. Portions drawn from "To be a good citizen and a good artist: Questions and explor... more Primary author. Portions drawn from "To be a good citizen and a good artist: Questions and explorations of ecologically restorative work," a paper I developed within "Art and Biotechnology," a seminar led by Eduardo Kac at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Presented in the Working Group “Trans-cultural, trans-national, trans-species histories in performance,” American Society for Theatre Researchers Conference, 2012.
In the Spirit of Homebirth: Modern Women, an Ancient Choice, weaves together intimate stories of ... more In the Spirit of Homebirth: Modern Women, an Ancient Choice, weaves together intimate stories of birth and community written by mothers, partners, doulas, midwives and children from the rocky shores, remote towns and cities of British Columbia, Canada.
Bronwyn’s collection of prose, poetry, photography and illustrations contributes to a renewed understanding of, and confidence in, women’s natural abilities to birth, creating transformative options for individuals and communities worldwide. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellent (NICE) in the UK recently released a report stating that midwife-care is safer than hospital care, and the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates a 55% increase in homebirths in the United States between 2004 and 2013. Inspired by Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery, Preece’s work gathers the vulnerable stories of powerful individual birthing experiences—from euphoric water births in supportive communities, to the overcoming of unexpected difficulties.
At the heart of this work is the conviction that women helping other women give birth is an ancient choice rather than a rogue, medically irresponsible idea. Bronwyn Preece places lived experiences at the center of her work, reminding us of the strength of women as mothers, caretakers and storytellers.
Performing Ethos, 2015
In the interview that follows, guest editors Bronwyn Preece and Jess Allen begin by asking her to... more In the interview that follows, guest editors Bronwyn Preece and Jess Allen begin by asking her to revisit that foundational text – which formed the motivation for this special themed issue, and the central provocation of its call for contributions – with a view to surveying how she believes the ethics of ecological performance practice are evolving, as set against this philosophical baseline.
(Due to our respective locations in Canada, the United Kingdom and the
United States, this interview was conducted via e-mail over two weeks from
late March to early April 2015.)