Upcoming dance film choreographed/filmed by: Tori Lawrence. Dancer shown: Ellie Goudie-Averill.
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Upcoming dance film choreographed/filmed by: Tori Lawrence. Dancer shown: Ellie Goudie-Averill.
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TORI LAWRENCE
JUNKSPACE
Bodies In Motion, 2020
WHERE I LIVE/CREATE AND IMPACT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING: I’m currently in rural Vermont. I feel lucky to be here within the mountains and the lake nearby. I am constantly amazed by the VT landscape (perhaps because it is so different than where I grew up) and find it to be endlessly rich in beauty. We're still getting the occasional dust of snow here, but hopefully it will warm up enough to be outside for longer stretches. During this time of social distance, I've been meeting with my Middlebury students online, going on long bike rides or drives, and taking up new hobbies like woodworking and improvising the piano. I have been busy editing a few of my dance films that I am hoping to release later this Summer/Fall. I've also been busy creating www.movementcrossings.com for my students in an effort for us to continue to improvise and make work together in these shifting times.
Movement Crossings features a collection of improvisation/composition/somatic scores and prompts compiled by an amazing group of artists. [They're kind of like improvisation class podcasts that you can take and listen to without being tethered to a computer screen.] I’m hoping that the site will be used by other students/educators/artists as a way to share/evolve a collective teaching practice. I’m finding ways for my improvisation students to still practice together [remotely] as an ensemble, but within this unrooted/unknown span. I don't have a clear idea of where I'll be living/working next year, but I'm listening to what my mentors have taught me (and what I now teach my students) of continuously showing up and being open to the outcome.
As a filmmaker, I often question if we're in an age of over-archivization and documentation, an overstimulation of information and making the fleeting permanent/immortal. Should our books and our projects outlast us? I wonder about the future of dance and how it is passed/shared. What is chosen to remain in the frame and what do we edit out? Who becomes archived? How much information do we gather from a digital body as we see it in a Zoom class or on a film? I wonder about the future body as it converses with the digital progressions. How do I bring these questions into my evolving practice?
Bodies In Motion, 2020
WHERE I LIVE/CREATE AND IMPACT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING: I’m currently in rural Vermont. I feel lucky to be here within the mountains and the lake nearby. I am constantly amazed by the VT landscape (perhaps because it is so different than where I grew up) and find it to be endlessly rich in beauty. We're still getting the occasional dust of snow here, but hopefully it will warm up enough to be outside for longer stretches. During this time of social distance, I've been meeting with my Middlebury students online, going on long bike rides or drives, and taking up new hobbies like woodworking and improvising the piano. I have been busy editing a few of my dance films that I am hoping to release later this Summer/Fall. I've also been busy creating www.movementcrossings.com for my students in an effort for us to continue to improvise and make work together in these shifting times.
Movement Crossings features a collection of improvisation/composition/somatic scores and prompts compiled by an amazing group of artists. [They're kind of like improvisation class podcasts that you can take and listen to without being tethered to a computer screen.] I’m hoping that the site will be used by other students/educators/artists as a way to share/evolve a collective teaching practice. I’m finding ways for my improvisation students to still practice together [remotely] as an ensemble, but within this unrooted/unknown span. I don't have a clear idea of where I'll be living/working next year, but I'm listening to what my mentors have taught me (and what I now teach my students) of continuously showing up and being open to the outcome.
As a filmmaker, I often question if we're in an age of over-archivization and documentation, an overstimulation of information and making the fleeting permanent/immortal. Should our books and our projects outlast us? I wonder about the future of dance and how it is passed/shared. What is chosen to remain in the frame and what do we edit out? Who becomes archived? How much information do we gather from a digital body as we see it in a Zoom class or on a film? I wonder about the future body as it converses with the digital progressions. How do I bring these questions into my evolving practice?
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CURRENT RESEARCH/THOUGHTS: My site-oriented performative and cinematic work is determined and directed by associational relationships between the body and landscapes/buildings/architecture. My work becomes part of the site as a way of surveying/measuring the resources that are already there, reorganizing the composition of the space, and then reorienting how it is seen. I work with the dancing body as a means to code and recode a site. I recode environments as a means to branch into other fantastical worlds of possibility – to move beyond the assumed properties of place and inscribed movement pathways. The undoing as a generative act and therefore a possibility for change.
As irregular topographies are bulldozed into a flatness, I feel a destabilization, an ungrounded transience of always traveling through somewhere and not having a home. Art historian Miwon Kwon states that “we are out of place all to often” and that “the intensifying |
JUNKSPACE, Bodies In Motion, 2020, Northampton MA. Photo by Anna Maynard
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conditions of such spatial undifferentiation and departicularization – fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications to accommodate an ever-expanding capitalist order – exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life."
TORI LAWRENCE
Tori Lawrence is a choreographer/filmmaker and the 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College where she teaches Movement and Media, Advanced Improvisation, and Technique Workshop. She creates immersive site-specific performances, interdisciplinary installations, and digital/analog screendance projects. Her environmentally-based work inspires an imaginative and sustainable way of looking at, thinking about, and using space. Her recent dance film projects have been funded by New England Foundation for the Arts, Lighton International Artists Exchange, Dance Films Association, and supported by residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, Ucross Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation, Dance Ireland, and Budapest's Workshop Foundation. Her current site-adaptive performance project "JUNKSPACE" was presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Sweden's Brunakra Residency Program, and Bodies in Motion Festival (presented by School for Contemporary Dance & Thought and A.P.E.@Hawley).
WEBSITE: www.torilawrence.org
INSTAGRAM: @torilawrenceco
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/torilawrenceco
TORI LAWRENCE
Tori Lawrence is a choreographer/filmmaker and the 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College where she teaches Movement and Media, Advanced Improvisation, and Technique Workshop. She creates immersive site-specific performances, interdisciplinary installations, and digital/analog screendance projects. Her environmentally-based work inspires an imaginative and sustainable way of looking at, thinking about, and using space. Her recent dance film projects have been funded by New England Foundation for the Arts, Lighton International Artists Exchange, Dance Films Association, and supported by residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, Ucross Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation, Dance Ireland, and Budapest's Workshop Foundation. Her current site-adaptive performance project "JUNKSPACE" was presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Sweden's Brunakra Residency Program, and Bodies in Motion Festival (presented by School for Contemporary Dance & Thought and A.P.E.@Hawley).
WEBSITE: www.torilawrence.org
INSTAGRAM: @torilawrenceco
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/torilawrenceco
