In December 2019 and January 2020, the CultureMoves team held its final project LabDays, working with a range of choreographers, dance artists and dance students across the West Midlands region.
On 2nd December 2019, a CultureMoves LabDay co-ordinated in conjunction with Birmingham Dance Network and took place at DanceXchange, Birmingham (UK), where we held one of the very first CultureMoves LabDay Coffee and Conversation events last year. The CultureMoves C-DaRE team was thrilled to be working alongside BDN and six locally-based dance artists and choreographers – Sophie Barraclough, Rosie (Rosanna) Cook, Steph (Stephanie) Donohoe, Shelley Eva Haden, Fleur Hall, and Rob (Robert) Hemming. During this LabDay, we invited the dancers to engage with digital content and consider the relationship between dance, public space, tourism and cultural heritage. The dancers explored the European online cultural heritage library, Europeana, thinking about space, memory, place, body and trace, and what heritage / intangible cultural heritage means to them as dance artists and choreographers. The dancers then familiarised themselves with MovesScrapbook and MovesCollect plug-in to curate material from Europeana and use this to create new choreographic scores in the studio.
On Tuesday 28th January 2020, the COVUNI CultureMoves team spent an enjoyable afternoon at the University of Worcester for the project’s final Educational LabDay workshop, exploring the value of the CultureMoves digital toolkit in a dance educational setting.
The participants were five very engaged final year Dance undergraduates working on a specialist Dance and Technology module and their lecturer. The CultureMoves team first gave an overview of the project and all three of the CultureMoves digital tools, and then the students worked on developing movement scores from Europeana content, also using MovesCollect and MovesScrapbook to document how they used this content as a springboard for creating new choreographic phrases and sequences. We ended the afternoon with a lively discussion about how we archive, document, annotate and remember dance. We discussed how digital annotators might be useful for this and the students are now very keen to try out MotionNotes as well!
The CultureMoves team would like to thank Megan Caine for co-ordinating the Birmingham LabDay on the BDN side and to DanceXchange for hosting us, and Dr. Paul Golz, Course Lead and Senior Lecturer for the Dance and Applied Practice, Physical Education and Dance at the University of Worcester, for inviting the CultureMoves team to Worcester for the Educational LabDay workshop.
