Life cycles – Laura Staniland
The T&P Spectrum for this workshop is: Blue, Orange
My impression is that every festival has a natural life cycle (having a basic birth, life, death…but also perhaps having a childhood, adolescence, maturity and mid-point crisis) and I think working with this idea and making this cycle distinct would make for a more enlivened festival and experience for everyone involved. From this perspective I have two proposals of contribution to the festival that I would like to explore and research during the experiment:
1. Re-childing. I’d like to create a space, perhaps in the mid-point of the festival, which people people enter as adults and leave as children – seeing the festival through new childlike eyes, playing with their new child playmates and bringing their innocence into the space. This would be informed by my experiences working with masks, clown, immersive performance and live-action role play.
2. Exploring, subverting, perverting and swapping our masks. This is about bringing our self-concepts, the stories we embody about ourselves, and our constructs of “who we are” and playing with them in our dancing. For me its a very joyful experience to turn these ideas about myself on their heads, and I’m curious about how it would be to do it as a group, to try on other people’s ideas and to play with that chemistry together. For me this is about the ‘adolescence’ of the festival – that point where everyone is beginning to figure out who’s who, and ‘how things work’….I’d like to play around with that.
Read Laura Staniland’s biography