Artsadmin Weekenders: Joe Moran and Christopher House

10.30 – 5.30pm
Availability to attend both days is essential

Cost : £60

Shifting Awarenesses
Choreographers Joe Moran (Dance Art Foundation, London) and Christopher House (Toronto Dance Theatre, Canada) will co-lead a Weekender lab which considers the interplay between two radical approaches to movement and performance: Deborah Hay’s complex, challenging and liberating performance inquiries and Joan Skinner’s seminal Releasing Technique. The lab will enable artists to question, complicate and disrupt their own performance habits.

This particular Weekender is intended for those with a performance practice and a strong interest in movement in performance. It will comprise extended movement sessions, reflection and discussion to foreground and interrogate perceptual presence and perceptual vitality as a performance practice.

This Weekender follows public performances of At Once Twice, House and Moran’s adaptations of Deborah Hay’s solo At Once at Toynbee Studios, 30 Nov – 3 Dec.

If you would like more background information on Deborah Hay and Joan Skinner, please download the PDF document.

Christopher House
Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) since 1994, Christopher House is one of Canada’s most respected dance artists. Resident Choreographer of TDT since 1981, he has contributed over sixty works to the repertoire. He has received many awards for his work, including three Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding New Choreography. He received the Muriel Sherrin Award for International Achievement in Dance in October 2009, and was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Memorial University in 2010.

As a performer, Christopher House has toured internationally in his own works and in those of Sarah Chase, Peter Chin, David Earle, Deborah Hay, James Kudelka, Mark Morris and Peter Randazzo. He premiered his adaptation of News by Deborah Hay in December 2006, and presented five performances of this piece at the Canada Dance Festival in June 2008. He has subsequently learned two more solos from Hay, I’ll Crane for You and At Once. He is Artistic Advisor of the Professional Training Program of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and has taught technique and creative process across Canada and at international institutions including the Juilliard School, Rotterdam Dansacademie and Jacob’s Pillow. He is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.

Joe Moran is a London-based choreographer, dancer and Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation. He creates dance performance, film and installation for theatres, galleries and public spaces. His work is currently driven by a fascination with a number of choreographic propositions: choreography as a structural intervention to provide a frame for the investment of meaning in the experience of pattern, organisation, variation and repetition; choreography as perceptual directives to cohere action and presence; choreography as an embodiment of ideas and critical thought; choreography as presence and rethinking subjectivities.

As a dancer, he has worked with many distinguished choreographers including Deborah Hay, Siobhan Davies (Bank 2008), Gaby Agis, Stephanie Skura, Kate Brown, Florence Peake, and Christopher House (Toronto Dance Theatre). He has also collaborated with visual artists Magali Reus and Shaan Syed. Joe is intrigued by curation as a choreographic endeavour and often curates other artists’ works in counterpoint to his own. In 2008, he co-convened the Dance & Critical Theory Group, a self-organising group of independent artists considering critical theory and contemporary dance practice. Joe trained in dance and choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, following his undergraduate training in theatre at Bristol University and extensive independent study in the UK and America. Joe teaches widely, for universities, festivals, studios and companies in the UK and internationally. He is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique.