BABY

Babes, Babies, Babyish.

Lady. Baby. Sexy babe.
Let's do it, Baby, Baby!
and Baby gets made!

Shock Horror.

Baby probes the extremes of experience that make us flesh and blood.

"disturbingly funny, thought provoking and, ultimately, beautiful to watch."
Sargasso News

"Wonderfully wild and touching, and not a moment of babygoogoo..." Lucy
Richardson Theatre Director

Bodies, biology and the Big Bang,

The BABY-ence that creates life.

Dance. Sound. Design. Projections. Tango.

Baby premiered in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts May 19-20 2003.

BABY is an interdisciplinary performance work that appeals to family
audiences 13+, dance audiences, live art and experimental audiences. Whilst
complex the work is accessible and theatrical.

Running Time: 70 minutes

Cast: 4 dancers / 1 actress

Performance space: Minimum 8m x 6m Harlequin floor or similar

Technical requirements: CD player

Slide projectors (we can bring these if necessary)

Projection screen

See attached leaflet for further information.

BABY a young people's educational project:

We are very interested in leading new projects with schools and colleges to
accompany a touring programme.

The creation and premiere of BABY was shadowed by a project with students on the BTEC National Diploma Dance course at Westminster Kingsway College, London.

The programme was designed to give them a bridge-building experience between training and the profession.

- The students explored ideas, memories and representations of babies, babes and the early years with its associated games, toys and stories through dance and mixed media improvisation. The majority of the students are young women (a group vulnerable to early, unexpected motherhood) and the programme served as an important awareness-raising exercise as well as a professional dance experience.

The students learnt choreographic sections of the work, experimented with the same objects and equations in the creation of new tango duets, dance work, tableau and text. The final workshop was held in the ICA's Theatre pre-show where their work thus far was fully staged, performed and filmed. (This work will be developed back at college into their own new work for performance at the end of their summer term).

The students then stayed to watch the show ­ viewing work that they had themselves explored and performed.

A final evaluation and feedback session was held at their College the following work.

E-Merge(nce)

e-MERGE is a sci- art performance project fusing new dance, music and computer images via the invention and creation of new technological systems, in collaboration with artists and organisations from France, Spain and the U.K.

e-MERGE responds to the growing interdisciplinary awareness of the science-art dialectic. In recent years Europe has become a world leader in the development of art communications that utilise the internet and new technology with artistic practice.

The project will:

- create a European cultural network to bring together artists, scientists, digital designers and art forms and organisations

- create a research team to develop innovative new technologies that will be used in live performances that combine music, dance and computer visuals in synergy.

- stage five public performances (1 France ­ involving on-line broadcast, 2 U.K., 2 Spain) of a unique Emergent multi-art creation involving artists and designers from different European origins.

- create new methods and technologies for artistic creation and cultural expression based on scientific theories.

- communicate these newly developed ideas and processes trans-nationally via a new website and e-publications.

- maintain and develop similar research and performance activity in the future.

The purpose of the project is to explore a scientific theory ­ Emergence ­ and its potential as an art-making process. Unsafe & Sound proposes to bring together art and science to create an innovative performance work using purpose built new interactive technologies based around the science theory of Emergence. Artists, scientists and audiences will explore and experience together the creative outcomes of network systems inspired by this new scientific development.

What is Emergence? A close relative of the theories of Chaos and Complexity, Emergence is the manifestation of complex patterns resulting from simple rules. Seemingly chaotic groups of elements, for example, migrating birds, groups of dancers, or musical notes, self-organise in unpredictable ways creating dynamic patterns: order from chaos.

Natural systems - weather, water movements in a river, growing vegetation - are subject to simple rules that generate patterns that are rhythmic and fascinating to observe, and are always different and unique. This is Emergence at work. The whole is more than the sum of its parts; and the system ­ whether a set of pixels on a computer screen, a group of dancers improvising, or a flock of birds flying ­ self-organises from the bottom up suggesting a group intelligence more powerful than the set of rules that initiated their movement. Some scientific minds consider Emergence as one of the most important discoveries of our age.

The e-Merge project will echo Nature's self-organising processes by creating a performance system that uses rules and networks that are shared by different groups, in this case: cultural operators, dancers, musicians, creative technologies, audiences. These will all be linked live, via purpose built software and hardware technologies. Each group will influence and respond to each other's activities on stage in real time demonstrating the powers of Emergence: Science is Art.

Unsafe and Sound together with CAMAC and AGERO will link up to create a new European research and performance development network for this project.

Background Information

As a contemporary dance-artist working professionally since 1989 I have found myself drawn to certain ideas and structures:

- common structures at the core of Nature's creations; e.g. spirals

- indeterminacy, interconnectedness, interdisciplinarity

- inside-out approaches (postmodern, non-linear, feminist aesthetics) letting bodies speak, working with different communities

- dance as a moveable, moving experience: unconventional and interactive performance spaces; engaging the audience in the creation of the work, siting performances in public and open spaces.

- creating new Lifeforms ­ art is a living experience, dance is a live thought process.

During 1996 I led a project with Luke Dixon exploring Synaesthesia, a medical condition whereby sufferers hear with their eyes, taste colours, feel sounds: a confusion of the senses. Discovering such a 'scientific' diagnostic condition that described a sensoral sensual vibrancy that I was seeking to evoke in dance performance works led to a growing interest in science as a language of discovery and its relationship to art.

Looking at the replicating structures at work in Nature's creative process underpinned several danceworks I created from 1986 onwards. These included Strange Attractors (1986) a live orbital improvisational duet between Daniel Biro on electric piano and myself in dance (performed: ICA, London Palladium, the Foundry, Munich), Hybrid (1997) Where Humanity and Botany Collide - a group work created and premiered in residency at Jackson's Lane - tracing Nature's complex methods of reproduction and mutation using organic choreographic methods, tango, film projection, sound collage, and Compost (1997) an irreverent solo show exploring gardening, fertility and female representations on TV commissioned by Chisenhale Dance Space, Now '97 and Dance 4 for the 'Trash' season.

(These two works went on to tour a wide range of venues; Chisenhale, Jackson's Lane, ICA, B.A.C., Glastonbury dance festival, Alsager, Munich.)

During 1999/2000 Daniel and I initiated an EU funded science-art research project hosted by the arts organisation LUST and taking place at the sci-art-new technology centre CAMAC in France which involved a team of artists and scientists (including Professor Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, Richard Brown of the R.C.A., Fabienne Audeoud, Trevor Waldron, exploring Emergence theory in relation to art practices.

In 2001, I explored the relation between chaos theory concepts and improvisational and dance performance making methodology in a number of ways:

- commissioned article for the Movement & Dance Quarterly ­ journal of the Laban Guild, publication Autumn 2001.

- with funding from the City of Westminster, I set up an education-based project exploring key concepts in a live event. Starting with images concerning Oplaces we come from and possible selves'

The project involved:

a) A series of open weekly improvisation and idea-sharing sessions that led into;

b) an intensive creation week 4-9 June at WestminsterKingsway College with a group of dancers drawn from the open workshops and students from the BAperforming arts course that the College runs.

Moveable and possibly moving dancetheatre material was created and compiled which was then

c) brought together as a Oliving installation' performance event entitled St. Albans on Saturday 9th June at 7.30pm for an invited free-to-move-around audience in the Nash & Brandon rooms ­ at the ica, The Mall, London SW1

April 20th 2002 ­ Delivered OChoreographing Chaos' paper at the New Scholars Conference. Organised by The Society for Dance Research, held at Coventry University.

This led to initiating a next phase research event where scientists participated in the Odance studio' in an exploring the semantics, mathematics, differences and confluences possible between art and science in engaging with EMERGENCE. Working at UNL with graduating students and a number of scientists in collaboration with culminated in an open lab and forum event at the ICA with scientist-in-residence Daniel Glaser on May 26th 2002.

March 12th 2003 ­ Delivered Emergence in Sci-art paper at the Research Centre for Creativity, London Metropolitan University.