Metamorphosis: The Animated Body
Company: Nataly Lebouleux & Kieran Sheehan (Improbable Dolls)
Supporting: Art Council England, Home. ALRA. Superbia, Waterside Arts, Creative Industries Trafford
A workshop for confident dancers and physical/visual theatre practitioners which explores, in a cross-art context – the creation of new relationships between the animated film image and the performing artist.
The workshop will focus on the development of a character’s physicality and inner life. We will delve intensely into the creative potential of the relationship between sensation and imagination, using it as a dynamic tool for the unfolding and tracking of an animated story through the body’s movement in space.
Working alone and in pairs, you will explore how your sensed responses to a variety of stimuli can allow you to:
- Generate subtle performance qualities and emotional movement vocabularies
- Increase your ability to activate your inner life in relation to the needs and demands of a character
Using Nataly’s animated film PAPER THIN as source material, you will also gain insights into the creative process employed to create her production MINA.
Nataly is an interdisciplinary artist working with moving image and performance. She spent 10 years making experimental award-winning stop-motion animation films under the name Improbable Dolls before exploring how to take her surreal narratives to the stage. Her work is immersive, relying on film, sound, light and physicality to create a unique style of visual storytelling at times closer to performance art than traditional theatre.
Kieran is a movement artist, researcher and tutor based in England. His primary interest is in the process of sensing information through the body and the relationship this feeling holds to movement, the world and imagination. Currently completing a doctorate focusing on this area and working as the Vice Principal (Curriculum) at one of the UK’s leading drama schools the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, his recent movement direction includes Lancastrians for Junction 8 Theatre Company. Previous work as a movement artist includes extensive work at Glyndebourne and Opera North, residencies with disenfranchised community groups and creation of his own arts council funded performance work.
Nataly and Kieran are presently researching new ways of devising movement in a cross art context, using metaphor and sensory work to develop authentic connection to choreography.
If you have access to an interpreter or would like us to provide one in order to participate in the workshop, please send us a request by Monday 9 December.