Dance/Movement Workshop

Free

The University of Atypical is delighted to work with award winning local dancer Helen Hall in offering a series of experimental workshops exploring dance and movement to find ways of expressing our physicality of how we move through our city and surroundings.   

Accessing Architecture: Disability and Belfast’s Built Heritage by the University of Atypical is funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund Northern Ireland. The project researches the history of the disabled community in Belfast through the city’s built, industrial and cultural environments.

Helen invites you to join us on a creative journey to collectively gather ideas around movement and what it means for you. No dance experience is necessary.  Your contributions will be through physical movement expression that you can document with a phone/video and through verbal responses, or whatever form of communication suits you best.

These responses will become the building blocks of an artwork responding to the concept of Accessing Architecture and will feature in an exhibition, compiled into a short film.

For the film Helen would like to gather input from participants in a number of ways.

• Discussion groups or whatever form of communication suits you best.
• Attending group workshops via zoom.
• Responding to creative tasks. This could either be within the group workshops or as tasks set by the artist to complete in your own time.

Participants should ideally have access to:

• something they can record their voice into, eg a phone. Or if you communicate in other ways, then a method you can share your thoughts, ideas and responses to the artist.
• A video camera/smartphone for recording responses, eg, movement expressions or snippets of journeys.

Helen Hall is a dance/movement and visual artist.  She is intrigued by the journeys we each make to navigate through the city. As someone with severe sight loss, Helen has developed her own unique ways of negotiation and is interested in how this is expressed physically. She is intrigued to work with others, to find out about their own unique ways of navigating their surroundings. She is interested in working with participants to creatively explore this idea and give voice to these beautiful ways of being.

Workshop Plan

Workshop 1 – Discuss the topic and meet the group.

Zoom workshop

Workshop 2 – movement explorations around the ideas of taking a journey.

Zoom workshop

Workshop 3 – Task Set: to record yourself talking about a short journey you take. Think of everything you sense or feel or physically do.
Artist will give detailed instructions and a sample.  Send your responses to the artist.

Workshops 4 -5 – Discuss the recordings.

Task Set: make movement explorations in relation to the responses.

Workshop 6 – Task Set: Capture video footage in relation to the explorations in the previous workshops. Participants will have a number of days to complete the task.

Workshop 7 – Task Set:  Artist sends images and sounds. Participants record self describing what you sense or feel when you hear or see the images and sounds – memories and association.

Workshop 8 –  Zoom. Discuss and show responses in relation to movement to the group

BOOKING: limited spaces available so please register your interest as soon as possible.

Click HERE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE

Access: Please let us know your access requirements in advance, you can do this when you fill in the booking form.

The workshop will be captioned.

About Accessing Architecture

Accessing Architecture: Disability and Belfast’s Built Heritage by the University of Atypical is funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund Northern Ireland. The project researches the history of the disabled community in Belfast through the city’s built, industrial and cultural environments.

Five artists have been commissioned to work with groups of D/deaf and disabled participants to creatively examine the built heritage of the city and contemporary attitudes towards access and inclusion in urban planning, design and architecture. This project will also contribute to a growing movement that aims to create a more integrated and exciting city for the future.

The University of Atypical is funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland