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STEaPP Internship: Choreographing the City

By ucqnfad, on 30 August 2018

STEaPP intern Luke Gregory Jones reflects on 6 months working on the Choreographing the City research project

In my time with UCL STEaPP I have been fortunate to observe, produce and reflect upon some hugely exciting research. The project I have been a part of, Choreographing the City, brings forward the productive possibilities of collaborative action between choreographic thinking and doing, and engineering. It is clear, the problems facing our contemporary cities require a diverse and trans-disciplinary approach. Expertise need to be challenged and shared across distant and seemingly unconnected fields. Choreographing the city, taking this transdisciplinarity as its starting point, brought together choreographers and engineers to discuss how they might work together to choreograph a city more sympathetic to the unique movements and diverse nee shapes of its citizenry.

My role in the project can be broadly split into two aspects. The first has been to consider, study and analyse the primary research produced by Dr Ellie Cosgrave and Dr John Bingham-Hall as part of the previous research workshops. These 5 workshops, which took place in the Autumn of 2017, each invited a choreographer and an engineer to, firstly, explore and analyse a particular area of central London (including Kings Cross, Euston and Great Portland Street), and then secondly to be interviewed jointly to reflect on the parallel theories and practices of choreography and engineering.

I have been calling on the interview transcripts, workshop film footage, and the participants work sheets and notes, to write a results paper. The aim of the paper is to communicate the theoretical importance of the research, elucidate our methodology, and also to offer a framework of analysis, based on the research, for the existing but also the potential relationship between choreography and engineering. The intention is to publish this paper in both choreographic and engineering journals, to continue the logic of collaborative action that threads throughout the research.

The second part of my internship has been to help facilitate, document and photograph a number of additional workshops. This additional programme of workshops is a direct result of the emergent themes from the research, and in many ways attempts to build upon some of the live and unfolding findings of the project whilst also bringing into circulation interested practitioners and potential collaborators. The first workshop was run by award-winning choreographer Hagit Yakira at UCL’s Pedestrian Accessibility Movement Environment Laboratory. This workshop brought together practicing engineers – planners, transport engineers, architects, consultants and computational modellers – to explore the choreographic method of improvisatory design. UCL’s PAMELA explores and expands the limits of quantitative engineering modelling, and aims to centre qualitative human-scale modelling to the engineering process. This was, then, the perfect location to expand this even further through the modelling and creative techniques of choreography. Yakira lead a movement workshop within the Laboratory, before leading the participants out into the world to explore movement within urban space. Yakira found news ways for the engineers to explore, inhabit and move through space. This was a collaborative exchange of how choreographers and engineers experience and understand space, and as such points to the epistemological possibilities of collaboration.

The second workshop I have been involved with was a symposium held at Siobhan Davies Dance studios, as part of the London Festival of Architecture, entitled: How does the city move you? On bodies, identity and urban design. This symposium, which once again brought together an incredibly diverse audience from the worlds of architecture, dance, engineering and design, also concluded a week long residency at the studios by dance company Candoco Dance Company – a company that brings together disabled and non-disabled dancers. Discussions on urban identities, urban mobility and human-centred design were concluded by the creation and performance of original dance work by Candoco. Where Yakira’s workshop had sought to bring the benefits of improvisatory design to engineers, this symposium brought together new and original discourses surrounding the contemporary city, and demonstrated that choreography is ideally placed to contribute to a more emancipatory, more human-centred, contemporary city.

These two workshops, as well as previous workshops and also ones to come, were an opportunity for us to put our research back into the world. The emergent themes from the research were given space to unfold, and in some ways given back to the practitioners to put into practice. It seems clear that this is a type of methodology in its own right, and bridges the gap between the academic and real-world aspects of the project. As part of my internship, I have been able to reflect on and write up these workshops, both for UCL’s online publishing and also Theatrum Mundi’s website. Thus also demonstrating the various levels this projects lives in; from academic publishing, dance workshops, symposiums and online blogging.

As my internship is coming to end, I have been working with Dr Cosgrave and Dr Bingham-Hall in planning the future life of this project. Part of this is related to funding, and we have been working alongside Professor Nick Tyler to discuss how we can have a more concrete and productive relationship with PAMELA. One of the most valuable assets of the project has been to bring together keen and interest practitioners from incredibly broad fields, and from this network lots of new and innovate research and collaboration can take place.

 

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