Artsadmin Weekenders: Julian Maynard Smith

This Weekender will explore new ways to perform ordinary actions such as thought, unassisted flight, body-snatching, clairvoyance and self-awareness, in the belief that performance inevitably evokes a relationship between the real world and our imaginative existence within it. Developing from individual and group performance exercises, the workshop will pursue ways of making aspects of perception and thought sculptural; a kind of tangible mental architecture.

We will explore ways to transform subjective experiences into ‘stuff’, insinuating a state of mind into the physical world, so that the stream of consciousness becomes objective performance. We will be inventing simple ideas and structures to mediate between the internal and the external, allowing forms for the random, unpredictable and passionate to come into play. Individual trajectories and group improvisations will emerge.

Julian Maynard Smith is a performer and writer, and founder and artistic director of Station House Opera. Since 1980 the company has created over thirty projects which use spectacle to explore the intimate relationship between people and their environment, from site-specific works built with thousands of breeze blocks, to simultaneous performances across continents using live internet streaming. Julian Maynard Smith is currently an AHRC-funded research fellow at the Central School of Speech and Drama.