Participatory choreography for political breaths
14:45-16:30, Studio 1

with Carol Brown, Kasia Pol

Dance states, unlike nation-states, are not territorially bound. How might a measure of the state we are in (or out
of) be figured in on our willingness to take a deep breath? How might our bodies become microphones voicing the
needs, urgencies, and demands of the present? Carol Brown in collaboration with performance designer Kasia Pol invites enacting political thought through a participatory culture of breath. Recuperating the dance studio as a site of enquiry for radical embodiment we will collectively develop and perform a manifesto of political breaths.

Carol Brown (NZ) is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and writer whose work crosses between the contemporary and the archival, the somatic and the virtual and the conceptual and corporeal. Originally trained in the Bodenwieser Method in Dunedin, New Zealand, she went on to become the first woman Choreographer in Residence at the Place Theatre, London. Carol won the Ludwig Forum International Art Prize for The Changing Room and a Jerwood Choreography Prize.

Carol completed one of the first practice-led PhDs in dance from the University of Surrey, UK. She is currently an Associate Professor in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland where she teaches dance and performance as research methods. She publishes regularly and recently edited Undisciplining Dance in Nine Movements and Eight Stumbles with Alys Longley.

Kasia Pol (NZ/PL) is a performance designer, creative producer, set and costume designer, who has based herself in NZ over the last 15 years while working and collaborating with various artists in New Zealand and internationally. She has been working across the varying fields of theatre, performance, installation, opera, dance, new media. She trained at the acclaimed Theatre Academy in Prague and graduated in 2003 with a Masters in Scenography. Since 2005 she has worked with Samoan choreographer and director Lemi Ponifasio and his company MAU, a collaboration which continued for 12 years. In April 2018 with choreographer Carol Brown she has started a new interdisciplinary project called Lungsong with group of wahine (women) and scientists from New Zealand, Iran, Argentina, Chile, Poland, and Hawaii which is responding to the devastating signs of climate change.