A Research of One’s Own: Creating an individual process for making and developing performance

Presented in Partnership with Young Lungs Dance Exchange.
Sunday, September 24th, 3:15 – 7 p.m. at the Output at Video Pool Media Arts Center. 100 Arthur Street, 2nd floor

For choreographers and movement-based performance makers.
This workshop explores methods of research for developing performance worlds and languages that are unique to each maker’s curiosities while engaging broadly different human experiences. Participants may bring in work or an idea for a work that they are interested in discussing and exploring within our pop-up “community of inquiry.” To register, email lvriend@gmail.com. Questions can be directed to Laura and David at this email as well. The workshop is pay what you can at the door or by e-transfer to lvriend@gmail.com. David Brick’s work in Winnipeg is made possible in part by a travel grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

David Brick is the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Headlong Dance Theater, a platform for performance research and grassroots artist support, founded in Philadelphia in 1993. He also directs the Headlong Performance Institute, a supported residency and training program. David collaborates broadly in making dance, participatory installations and community. The experience of growing up as a hearing person in a Deaf family continually influences his thinking about performing bodies as being both subjects and agents of culture. His writings about art practice as a form of thinking and experience can be found on The Quiet Circus Blog.

In addition to the Headlong family of collaborators, he has worked closely with dance and theatre artists whose work he loves and whom he is fortunate enough to conspire in a variety of ways, including Ishmael Houston Jones, Eiko Otake, Rosie Herrera, Dan Rothenberg, Maiko Matsushima, Mimi Lien, Keely Garfield and Reggie Wilson.

Since 1993, Headlong has created a large body of work that has been performed nationally and internationally. Headlong’s work has been supported by numerous NEA grants, Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation MAP fund, The New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, the Wyncote Foundation, The William Penn Foundation and the Pew Center for Arts and Culture, and many others. Fellowships awarded to Brick include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, an Independence Foundation Fellowship and a Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission.

His large-scale public art project The Quiet Circus (www.thequietcircus.com) was a weekly public performance that took place on an urban river site in Philadelphia over the course of a year and a half. Partnering with art and social practice curator Mary Jane Jacob and Philadelphia Contemporary, these outdoor events— along with a curated series of reflection events and River Charrette collaborations at river sites throughout the region—invited ongoing and deepening levels of participation by the public as they engaged and co-created a series of accumulating performance and contemplation scores.