Artsadmin Weekenders: Karen Christopher

Something From Nothing
These two days, a swift journey through the first steps of idea and realisation. The workshop involves crisp actions towards making without initially engaging too much thought. This direct approach is followed by reflection, response, and development. Group collaboration strategies are employed to inspire individual breakthrough. Trading, stealing, and imitating the work of fellow participants blurs boundaries of authorship while stimulating new individual directions. Finding ways to access both conscious and unconscious methods of creating work, participants exercise their own ability to turn off the inner critic and simply present what comes, as well as practicing creative methods to employ critical faculties once new material emerges.

Karen Christopher, now London-based, is a collaborative deviser, performer, and teacher. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until they disbanded in 2009. Her workshops, developed over this period, focus on methods of collaboration and negotiation, shared material generation and devising strategies. Her performance work employs evocative visual combinations and relies on bodies in time and place juxtaposed with spoken word. Her creative process is more like uncovering what the world holds rather than creating what was never there. Her practice includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet.