thecityandthecityandthecity mb0died

A site-specific choreography by Carolyn Deby, UCL Urban Laboratory Artist-in-Residence

Wednesday 25th, Thursday 26th January + Friday 27th January 2012 FREE - two shows nightly: 6:15pm + 8:15pm 

Through movement, video, place, text and sound, this site-specific choreography will consider interleaved layers of an urban existence. In particular, flows between people, ideas, practices and territories within the Urban Laboratory, and between it and its surrounding 'everyday' contexts, will be explored as a series of simultaneous 'cities'. Forty people at a time will experience the piece, as they travel together in and around UCL's Bedford Way building. How can we understand the physical flows through this specific place and time in relation to constellations of urban thought? Can the bodily connection to these thoughts be mapped or choreographed or understood?

Working from an embodied perspective, thecityandthecityandthecity mbOdied will highlight interactions with spaces, gazes and thoughts that lie beyond the boundaries of the institution. In parallel, taking a specific area of the Urban Laboratory's expertise, the piece will consider overlooked flows of urban nature-even 'bad' nature, such as weeds, bacteria, or insects-that transgress the intended confines of the built environment or delineated socio-political territories.  

This choreographic research project has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, UCL Urban Laboratory, and PAL (Performing Arts Lab). Devised by artist/choreographer Carolyn Deby with performers Pia Nordin, Alexandra Baybutt, and Jia-Yu Corti. Carolyn Deby's artistic residency has been undertaken in collaboration with Prof Matthew Gandy and Dr Ben Campkin (Director, UCL Urban Laboratory).  

Carolyn Deby is an artist/choreographer whose site-based, performance work examines the lived experience of humans-situating the human body/psyche within landscape-investigating how humans and the 'urban' are implicated in systems/reconstitutions of 'nature'. Carolyn works internationally as sirens crossing. www.sirenscrossing.com

Performing Arts Labs: the PAL Movement & Meaning Lab collaborative research grant, instigated by the dance artist Gill Clarke, supports emerging artists/researchers in trans-disciplinary forms of exploratory research rather than finished works. The research will be shared in an open-studio presentation at the Siobhan Davies Studios in Spring 2012. www.pallabs.org