Oozing Future Creative Lab
Over the next fortnight I will be running a brand new initiative designed to explore alt-circus and futures thinking in Circus and Physical Theatre.
It’s happening at the Darebin Arts Centre in Preston, Naarm (Melbourne) and is completely free to attend! You can come to one or multiple workshops.
Joining this WhatsApp group will give you access to daily updates about what’s on:
https://chat.whatsapp.com/Ll5lYkZNG5k03aKVyCLuS5
Session Info
Studio Time:
Each morning will start with a guided warm up from 9:30am to get us into our bodies and in the room.
Then I’ll host an open studio for chats and collaborations. This is a chance to bring in your ideas and workshop them one on one or in small groups. We will have a small making space set up too.
Guided workshops:
Tuesday 5th: Futures Thinking
In this workshop I will introduce the concept of the future as a political idea. How we think about the future has a significant effect on how we act in the present. Through a guided reading of Mark Fisher’s seminal text Capitalist Realism, we will discuss his suggestion that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. This makes it all the more important to begin thinking about positive futures - and I feel that this must be a collective undertaking. To get us started on this path, we will play a card game called More and More, which has been designed to help groups of people imagine new futures.
Wednesday 6th: alt-circus
What is alt-circus and why is it called that? What is circus anyway? In this session I will share some of my thinking and research about where circus is positioned in the current cultural landscape, and open up a space for conversation about where we might like to take circus next. I’ll talk about Oozing Future, unpack the methods I’ve experimented with to create new work, and connect these back to the theories and ideas that have inspired me.
Thursday 7th: Creation Methods
How do you make work? What processes do you use? What do you wish you knew more about? In this group session, we will open the floor for each of us to speak about what happens when we create performances. It can often feel artists get stuck reinventing methods to make things because we are so focused on our own missions. I hope that if we bring our questions and challenges to the shared space of this conversation, we will start to discover new solutions that benefit us all.
Friday 8th: Performing the Future
How do we make performances that create the kind of world that we want to live in? What does our art form do to the bodies of the audience that might put them into a receptive space for political possibility? This session will draw together the reflections and ideas from the previous three days into a facilitated devising workshop where we let our imaginations go. Let’s think big, while also staying connected to the vision of something hopeful that we are working towards.
Monday 11th: Futures Thinking #2
This workshop will pick up and extend on the first Futures session. You don’t need to have done the first one to do the second, but I will add a little more political theory through some guided reading of Jonathan White and David Graeber, who writes beautifully that 'The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’. We’ll also play the More and More card game for a second time.
Tuesday 12th: Creation Methods
This workshop will resume the conversation from week one, picking up on any ideas raised in the first workshop and continuing to develop our shared understanding of how we make work.
Wednesday 13th: alt-circus
In this workshop I will elaborate on some of the ideas from week one, specifically by talking about alt-circus in relation to the questions of the future that have been raised during the past fortnight. How could a future that we imagine together be expressed as a style of performance? Who will author this style and what markers is it known by? This emerging genre of work is something happening at the edges of circus communities around the world. What makes Melbourne/Naarm a special place to continue evolving it, and how can we support ourselves to do it?
Thursday 14th: Rehearsals before Assemblages event?
There is no expectation that we will produce anything ready to perform during the Lab. But if anything should arise that we want to share with a small audience of peers, then I have set this afternoon aside to work on it together.
Thursday 14th: Assemblage event 6-8pm
During this exhibition I’ll present my research from several international conferences, connecting their themes together to provide the context for a brief snapshot of what Oozing Future is working on in the year ahead. I will also exhibit a collection of photographs and assemblage objects, and have some new Oozing Future merch ready to sell. There will be small bar! I’d love to see you there!
Please get in touch if you have any questions!