a place for performance: session.2
conversations.3:session.2:trailer
conversations.3:session.2:part.1of2
conversations.3:session.2:part.2of2
Panel
Dr. Eilon Morris
percussionist, composer, actor & educator, Yorkshire
Based in West Yorkshire, Eilon Morris works as a percussionist, composer, actor and educator throughout the UK and internationally. He is a senior lecturer at Leeds Conservatoire and recent projects include his collaboration as a music producer with Zoe Katsilerou on project mάzoksi, working as a puppeteer and musician on The Wicker Husband at the Watermill Theatre, and composing for and performer in OBRA Theatre Co’s latest production IBIDEM.
In 2017, Eilon published his first book, Rhythm in Acting and Performance: Embodied Approaches and Understandings (Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama). In 2013, Eilon completed a PhD investigating the role of rhythm in actor training, at the University of Huddersfield, following on from a Masters in Ensemble Physical Theatre completed in 2008.
Eilon is a core member of Iceberg and OBRA Theatre Co, as well as an associate artist at Whitestone Arts. He was a founding member of the Quiddity Ensemble (2001-2004) and the Butterfly Club Pocket Theatre (1998-2002) in Melbourne Australia
since relocating to the UK in 2004, Eilon has worked on productions including Day of the Living (RSC), Lord of the Flies (BBC Radio Drama), These Trees are Made of Blood (Southwark Playhouse and Arcola Theatre), Gaudete (OBRA), Le Voyage dans la Lune (BFI), It’s Like He’s Knocking (Unfinished Business), Electric Field (IOU), Shattering Man (DUENDE), and Rhein (Royal Festival Hall), as well as touring and recording with music groups including Stems and Kelter.
In recent years Eilon has also taught and presented research at cultural and educational centres including Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College, University of Kent (UK) the Duende School of Ensemble Physical Theatre (Greece, India), Au Brana Cultural Centre (France), Baratza Aretoa (Basque Country), Université Laval, Québec City (Canada), Taller de Investigación Teatral (Mexico) and Universidad Nacional de las Artes (Argentina).
Shambhavi Singh
professional coach
co-founder, OddBird Theatre & Foundation, New Delhi
Shambhavi is a trained professional coach and the co-founder of the OddBird Theatre & Foundation, a New Delhi based performing arts nonprofit. Her work history over 15+ years has focused on communications and operations. Coaching amalgamates her academic background in sociology and theatre, with her job experience through the lens of people and their stories. She is currently researching the intersection of theatrical improv and coaching, as applicable to growth, leadership and culture. She is also experimenting with ways in which the coaching framework of inquiry and reflection can inform an audience’s experience. When she isn’t pondering the power of performance (and forcing alliterations) she can be found fantasising about lindy hop lessons.
Vaishnavi Mannava
contemporary dancer & performer
New Delhi
Vaishnavi is a performing artist with an early training in Bharatanatyam from the young age of 4. Her work is led by curious explorations at the intersection of human psychology, physiology & cultural imprint; often leaning towards creating large scale images made from accessible objects or material and movement.
Vaishnavi enjoys mixing mediums and resists limitations set by forms or norms. Improvising with different forms of music, visuals, shadows, and poetry is another form of expression she engages in. These works are often performed in intimate spaces like boxes, drawing rooms or terraces, or unexpected spaces like bars/ cafes and public parks.
View Vaishanavi’s improvs here:
+ Flashbulb: Undiscovered Colours
+ Trippy Tales Chapter One
One of Vaishnavi’s current passions is a piece called Cat’s Cradle, which was created in 2018 through the course Body, Space & Time at Gati Dance Forum, with the help of mentors like Mandeep, Deepak, Ranjana, Navtej, Surjit, Preeti Attreya & Mini, and her co-performer, Greeny Francis. The piece, through a scaled-up and embodied game of the Cat’s Cradle, explores the complex interdependency of two entities in a given space and its Gestalten effects on the performers and audience alike.
Cat’s Cradle has been graciously supported and hosted by many people and places over the last 3 years. Vaishnavi is currently working on expanding this piece and also exploring new concepts that have risen from solitary contemplations facilitated and forced upon by the lockdown.
Cat’s Cradle
Note on Conversations.3 initiative
What is it to be told, without being spoken with or to, that one’s primary calling isn’t an essential service to society? What is it for the sociable to be denied the opportunity to congregate? What is it for the embodied creative to not have the opportunity to create? Whether self-imposed or state-enforced, over the past year we have dealt with isolation of different kinds in different ways. I consider it invaluable to engage with performance practitioners to ask and know how they’ve been over the past year. Therefore, this conversation series with practitioners and entrepreneurs whom I’ve been in touch with or moved by.
This program is my attempt at furthering conversations on the questions and perspectives presented by Kolkata based dramaturge, Dr. Rustom Bharucha in his 9-episode speech act tilted, Theater and the CoronaVirus, published in January (’21). Here’s the link to Dr. Bharucha’s work which offers a comprehensive historical perspective on the pandemic, performing arts and communities:
Each session has a panel of three participants, comprised of a young practitioner, a veteran and an entrepreneur (who owns/ manages a place of performance). The conversations, initiated and interspersed with Qs and largely propelled by the participants, would last two hours each. The Qs are generic based on the participants’ performance/ performative/ spatial/ theoretical/ creative engagements. Questions (such as, How have you engaged in your art over the past year? Are there shifts in your perspective with respect to your art? What are your ideas about the space for practise and performance considering what the world has been through in the last one year?) are intended as catalysts to the conversations with and between the participants.
The recordings of the five conversations will be edited and posted on this website – one episode every Saturday through the month of August.
I don’t consider it important for us to positively conclude conversations. Instead, it is perhaps far more important to simply congregate in whatever form possible and become responsive to the fireworks of ideas and insights lit up by the conversations.
Sidharth
June-July 2021
malkum
