Studio Light Moves: Residency & Sharing

Date:

Thu 15 Dec 2022

Time:

14:00 - 15:00

Venue:

DanceHouse

Admission:

Free. Advance Booking Required

Dance Ireland and Light Moves Festival invite you to an open studio sharing by Canadian choreographer Jacinte Armstrong and Media Artist / Architect James Forren to experience their augmented reality work, VERSION 2.0.
The artists are in residence in DanceHouse, from December 5th – 16th.

The open studio sharing is immediately followed by a Critical Encounter talk where the artists will be in conversation with choreographer Mary Nunan and immersive technology producer Linda Curtin. This encounter invites everyone interested in dance, technology and media art to join the discussion and explore the process and learning of this work in progress. Be part of nurturing conversations across the dance and technology community!

This residency is a partnership between Dance Ireland and Light Moves. Artists were selected through an open call process and will receive a €5,000 bursary and two weeks studio space in Dance House Dublin following on from a two-week research at Light Moves Open Futures residency lab in Limerick in June.

Studio Light Moves is an initiative of Light Moves Festival aimed at investing in and nurturing creative process and enquiry in dance, technology and screen-based dance practices. The Open Futures Residency is in partnership with Dance Limerick, Dance Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Digital Media and Arts Research Centre and the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City and County Council with support from Wriggle - Tech in Education.

There is a Critical Encounter talk after this studio sharing, from 3-4.30pm- read more HERE.

Register for the Studio Sharing:

Residency Information:

ABOUT VERSION 2.0

Artistic research connecting dance and Augmented Reality technology

SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) Dance: Jacinte Armstrong, James Forren, Gillian Seaward-Boone

This work brings together augmented reality (AR) technology with movement scores through the use of AR head-worn displays (HWDs) and hand held devices. Choreographer Jacinte Armstrong and dance artist Gillian Seaward-Boone explore the edges of the virtuosic and the pedestrian: toggling between the functional movements of simply using the technology, and creating more expressive movements through playing with holograms using dance-based scores.

Architect James Forren uses Augmented Reality technology to capture, encode, and display Jacinte and Gillian’s movements, bringing embodied information into a digital model in a cross-disciplinary dialogue across different modes of thinking and doing.

In VERSION 2.0, we are interested in the dancer and audience interactions with the technology and with the holograms as objects, and wonder what factors make this technology more or less accessible. Is it possible to offer audience members a new experience of their bodies using this technology? Is it possible to share one person’s movement with another through the holographic traces they leave behind? Can the use of this technology increase or change the experiences of people with different kinds of movement abilities? Do traces of a movement share the “dance” that existed? Might it it facilitate new forms of dance?

Funders include Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, and the Province of Nova Scotia.

About the Artists:

Jacinte Armstrong (she/her) is an artist based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. Her work explores embodied practice through performance, choreography, collaboration, and curation, communicating the experience of the body in relation to objects, materials, and people. Her practice involves questioning the ethics of movement in both performers and audience, and aims to create situations of physical comfort in which to ask uncomfortable questions. She seeks to create knowledge about the body through performance and give value to that knowledge. 

Jacinte is Artistic Director and co-founder of SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) dance, and performs regularly with Mocean Dance and independently. From 2014-18 she was Artistic Director of Kinetic Studio, presenting an annual season of contemporary dance workshops and performances in Nova Scotia. In 2016, she was awarded an Established Artist Recognition Award by the Nova Scotia Arts and Culture Partnership Council, and a Masterworks Award for her work as a dancer in Mocean Dance’s “Canvas 5x5” choreographed by Tedd Robinson.

Her choreography ranges from intimate and imagistic to large-scale collaborations with architects, visual artists, radio producers, filmmakers, and musicians. As an independent artist she has worked with many choreographer/collaborators including Cory Bowles, Sara Coffin, Susanne Chui, Veronique MacKenzie, Lisa Phinney Langley, Liliona Quarmyne, Tedd Robinson, Serge Bennathan, Danièle Desnoyers, Denise Fujiwara, Sarah Chase, Liz Kinoshita, Sarah Joy Stoker, Katie Ward, Secret Theatre, and more. Since 2015, she has been part of the 8 DAYS project, an annual gathering of Canadian choreographers (www.8days8jours.ca). Jacinte received an MFA in Performance from NSCAD University in 2020, and is currently in training to become a Certified Movement Analyst through the Laban/Bartenieff Institute in New York City.

www.sinsdance.com, www.jacintearmstrong.com

 

James Forren is an Associate Professor of Architecture in Design and Technology at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.  He utilizes computational, fine arts, and anthropological methods in the study of new materials and material technologies in architectural contexts. His research focuses on the production of architectural components and assemblies, concrete and composite technologies, and people’s experiences with materials in industrial, design, and public contexts.

His research has been published in scholarly journals and conferences including the The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) and Scroope: The Cambridge Architectural Journal. His exhibited work has received awards at Mongeometrija 2018 and The S.ARCH (Sustainable Architecture) 2019 and 2020. His current research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) New Frontiers in Research Fund Exploration (NFRF-E) program for the transdisciplinary project, “Gesture and Form: A Field-based Approach to New Methods of Architecture and Handcraft in Textiles Using Augmented Reality Technologies”; and through industry collaboration with the Canadian Precast Concrete Institute (CPCI) for the directed research project, “Soft Rock: Artificial Rock Technologies Explored as Soft Systems”. www.jamesforren.com