COMPOSURE Media Release - Fringe Festival

Composure

an interchange / an exchange / an improvisation

Composure is an improvised dance practice which challenges common modes of choreography and performance. Composure will be shared as a 12-hour endurance piece and invites audiences to share in the creation and development of the work.

Auckland Fringe Festival

Saturday 25 February 11am - 11pm  

Samoa House Studio, off Beresford Square

Dunedin Fringe Festival
Friday 17 March 11am-9pm
23 Princes St
The project is supported through Letting Space's Urban Dream Brokerage service with funding from Dunedin City Council

Composure is a creative practice developed by Leah Carrell and Benjamin Mitchell with a group of recent contemporary dance graduates (Unitec, 2015.) The focus is on how we each approach the task of making; what we are interested in seeing bodies do, and how we get them to do it. We use movement, dance and voice to interact with sound, space, and people; performers shift within the space generating an experience that is both created and explored in its moment of inception.

Composure is rich, imaginative, and engaging. In presenting our live-choreographic practice we offer a rich insight into the making of movement work. As a 12-hour endurance piece, Composure pushes the boundaries of traditional expectations around choreography and performance creating an experience that is different for the audience and is challenging, both physically and creatively, for the performers.

We offer an opportunity to see how dance is made; how it evolves and develops. We create a space for inclusivity, involvement, enjoyment and offer audiences an unconventional way of engaging; they are invited to observe our methods of making dance (our processes, explorations, triumphs and failings.) We invite the audience to pop in and out of the space observing, influencing, and contributing to the work.

• Come as a dancer: investigate, with us, our methods of working.
• Come as a maker: bring an idea you would like us to use to make dance (a painting, a poem, a story you think could inspire movement)
• Come and play an instrument and we can improvise together!
• Come as an observer: sit and watch it all unfold!

Join us for a few minutes or stay for an hour. Return to see our progress!

Koha entry

Follow our progress on our blog: composureproject.blogspot.co.nz

COMPOSURE - Part III Session 19

A NEW SPACE

We are working towards an open sharing of our Composure practice as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival and the Dunedin Fringe Festival!! This is very exciting for us all. Following on from our open rehearsal in December, we are interested in sharing our practice -and opening it up for people to join in!

The focus is on how we each approach the task of making; what we are interested in seeing movers do, and how we get them to do it. It pushes the boundaries of traditional expectations around choreography and performance by using movement, dance and voice to interact with sound, space, and people, employing a progressive audience/artist interaction.

In Auckland, we will be sharing this as a 12-hour endurance improvisation piece at the Samoa House Studio, Samoa House Lane off Beresford Square. The studio is beautiful, spacious, and offers much new modes of explorations.

During practice, we investigated the space:

-move
-look -consider / think
-observe / investigate
-question
-involve the body
-contact
-touch
-sound / rhythm

We feel the history, we consider what has been before. We are the first dancers in the space (since The Actor' Program have taken it over) and we use our muscle memory to understand the space. We give, we listen, we talk.

COMPOSURE - Part III Session 18

BACK IN TO IT

We had a month-ish break. To relax, rest, refresh.

Coming back to moving, dancing, composing we needed a long session of getting back in to our bodies.

-pilates
-phrases
-creating
-teaching
-learning
-sweating
-dancing

2017!!

Kia ora,

we have began moving / creating / dancing again!!

A written post to follow, but first, some images!

here are a few captured moments of us in the Samoa House Studio - the venue for our epic 12-hour improvisation event (Saturday 25 February)