Festival Project Journal

I was thinking about the self as a constant marker of identity and being alive and started to think about what else physiologically are constants throughout life that a person can feel/hear, which led me to breathing and heartbeats. Breathing is something I've already used within my choreographic practice with the dancers as a driver for creating contact movement, doing improvisational warm-ups stemming from breathing into each others' backs and how they can send energy from the great between them and breath into different body parts. This was inspired by part of our choreographic process on residency with Patricia Okenwa, where she gave us similar tasks to get in touch with our bodies in the space and between each other in developing contact work. Knowing my dancers weren't as experienced in contact, I thought that would be a good starting point in establishing a relationship and genuine connection between the dancers.  With heartbeats though, I immediately started thinkin...

For this rehearsal, we were in studio 5, which is quite a small space, so I spent the time we had offering a lot of prompts for the dancers to improvise to. I'm starting to feel quite nervous about getting the piece done in time as I haven't been able to work on it much over my break due to work and illness, so I thought I'd start the first rehearsal of the term off with being very experimental and improvisational to hopefully spark some ideas for me. One perk of being in this studio, though, is its window into the social space at Dance City. With one of the key themes of this work being the contrast of internal and external perception, I wanted the dancers to get used to the idea of being perceived outside of a traditional theatre space, as you can see in a lot of the videos from this rehearsal that people around the building will have a look in. This is interesting for the dancers as it allows the process to be observed in the same way that the performance is, but also fo...

  Performance Information Requirement Form   Performance Pieces   DanceCity Newcastle – (BA Festival Project – Name: Fuzion Festival)     Please com plete this form and return to bh99yk@student.Sunderland.ac.uk (Kate Ovington) by 04/04/2024     Name of artist /company   Kate Ovington   Contact email     Bh99yk@student.sunderland.ac.uk   Name of piece     Superficial Thinking   Date and Time     Thursday 30 th May – 16:45 (Double Bill with Courtney’s work, starting at 16:45, my piece at 17:00)     Location     Theatre   Duration     10-12 minutes   Number and names of performers   2 Performers – Emily Armstrong, Tilly Jobson   Appropriate age     7+   Trigger warnings     Movement created from a m ental h ealth stimulus of depersonalisation which could be triggering to some , haze   Short copy ( 50 words max , info about...