I have recently returned from teaching at the China Academy of Art in Shanghai. As a practitioner & researcher in Performance & Media I wanted to use my knowledge and experience and combine it with the students expertise and interests to create a unique and experimental process and live art performance.

Creative Conversations in the Dialogic Design for Dance – The Metal Party: Bauhaus Re-imagined through interactive, immersive and intermedial performance.

Courses involved: Digital Media, Performance, Physical Theatre, Mapping, Composition, Set Design, Costume Design, Video capture & edit, Live Art, Contemporary & Performance Art.

This project was an intensive creative exploration at the China Academy of Arts, Shanghai with final year undergraduate students. Development began in the first wave through a remembering of the Bauhaus, its practitioners, pioneers and radical thinkers. We used Bauhaus techniques, approaches and exercises to begin to form a foundation for our exhibition. We practised Johannes Itten breathing techniques and explored his fondness for basic shapes (the line, the plane, the circle, the spiral). We also made László Moholy-Nagy photograms from basic materials and used these for our posters to advertise our exhibition with Herbert Bayer’s technique of blending analogue and digital, using typography and photography with our handmade photograms. We examined Wassily Kandinsky’s shape and colour correspondence theory and also used inspiration from Oskar Schlemmer’s costume designs. Our exercises and experiments explored textural relationships to understand the physical motivations for design. We also inquired into garment led choreography, interactive set and wearable technologies to further extend our approaches.

During the second wave students played with free flow, creative connections and movement. In this physical and playful section, we were led by the possibilities of manipulation, shadow shapes and silhouettes, exploring choreographic techniques and storytelling through physicality. We developed physical strategies for rising and falling, movement with meaning and appropriate approaches to choreography. We also discussed creative ideas and specialist abilities so as to be able to build teams with varying disciplines so as to make an original design or dance with all necessary roles covered with a ‘designing with the dancer in mind’ approach. Concept designs were driven by textural, audio and visual motivation(s) that aimed to build a creative conversation between set and dancer, costume and video & music and projection to manifest a dialogue through a Bauhaus re-imagined.

During the third and final wave groups worked intensively together, under their chosen company and performance names, building models, set designs, costumes, composing music, making videos/projection and mapping, props and headdresses, as well as building the Metal Party stage where the finale song was played by the band Noise. The final exhibition was four groups: Ling – A Single Boat, The Beginners – X, Y, Z, Metropolitan Aquarium – Nymph and Don’t Move – A Place in the Galaxy. The audience moved from the first performance which was outside in the sculpture garden to the inside exhibition space for the three remaining performances, the experience ended with a performance from Noise to conclude the Bauhaus Metal Party re-imagined.