PLEASE NOTE: New date and location
OSU Dance and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design Co-Sponsor Guest Scholar:
Dr. Vida Midgelow, Professor, School of Media and Performing Arts, Middlesex University London
Improvisation resists conventional academic approaches. It is perceived to be too fleeting, too subjective, too difficult to document, assess and evaluate, too insignificant perhaps to bother with too deeply. Yet understanding of its significance in the arts is growing and its importance for our everyday interactions, for innovation and political action, is being recognized. Given this context, how might improvisation be understood as research? How might it offer, to follow dancer Lisa Nelson, ‘a methodology that has potentially as wide an application and manifestation as the word “choreography”’?
Investigating the nature of improvisation, and associated languaging strategies, the presentation argues for recognition of the epistemic work of the improviser and elaborates the ways in which improvisation, as a form of knowledge-as-process, embodies a ‘liquid’ approach to research.
ABOUT THE SCHOLAR:
Vida L Midgelow has over 20 years experience facilitating and lecturing in performance. As a movement artist her work currently focuses upon somatic approaches to dance training, improvisation and articulating choreographic processes.
Recent works include: Home (a replacing); Skript and Voice (a retracing). Recent essays include: Nomadism and Ethics in/as Improvised Movement Practices (Critical Studies in Improvisation, 2012) and Sensualities: dancing/writing/experiencing, (New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2013). Her book Reworking the ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies was published by Routledge in 2007. In the same year the poetic and playful, TRACE: Improvisation in a box was published.
In 2011 she launched the hybrid peer reviewed journal, Choreographic Practices, published with Intellect. The 5 vol/2 issue of Choreographic Practices includes a co-authored essay (with Professor Jane Bacon) that outlines their Creative Articulations Process (CAP), which is designed to support artistic practices and (self)-reflexivity. She is currently editing an extensive volume on Dance Improvisation (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Free and open to all. Contact dance@osu.edu for more information.
