Enter and Inhabit

Enter & Inhabit

Project Introduction

enter & inhabit investigates our changing experiences of the outdoor spaces that we pass through. Using durational movement improvisation, photography and writing, the project explores embodied presence in sites of flow and transition. The project is underpinned by an interest in the different modes of perception invoked for audience by somatically-informed movement practices. This activity recognizes and foregrounds interaction between people and places, exploring how embodied population of sites can invoke new encounters with familiar places. Casting accidental audience and invited witnesses as co-creators, the project offers mediated traces of the artists' embodied experience as an invitation into public spaces and landscapes.

Background

Natalie Garrett Brown and Amy Voris began the project in 2007, using their ongoing training in a bodywork practice of experiential anatomy called Body-Mind Centering (BMC), to explore durational dance improvisation practice in outdoor spaces. This resulted in a duet that was performed in a series of underpasses around the Coventry ring road in 2008 as part of the Summer Dancing festival. Photographer Christian Kipp and dancer/writer Niki Pollard joined the project in 2009, to develop the work further both in Coventry and also for a residency at Aberystwyth University. In 2010, enter & inhabit was invited by Dance in Devon to develop their work, culminating in a performance event and artist sharing in North Bovey, Devon. Currently enter & inhabit are collaborating with movement artist and scholar Emma Meehan as part of Sensing the city.

The first site that the project concerned itself with was the underpass system of the Coventry ring road. The ring road is an intrigue of post-war architecture. Its underpass system comprises of concrete structures with landscaped gardens, longstanding trees and historic monuments serving to remind of us of the possible blur between the rural and urban within the UK landscape where little is truly wild or untended. Since 2007, enter & inhabit has subsequently worked in wooded sites, rivers, beaches, university campuses and farmers’ fields. Over the past few years, we have returned to the Coventry ring road as part of the Sensing the city project.

Broad in its spread of references and lineages, the enter & inhabit project can be located within contemporary dance practice, particularly the British New Dance tradition. Following the teachings of UK based environmental dance-maker Helen Poynor, the project draws on US dance artist Anna Halprin’s model of collaborative working, The RSVP Cycles. Formulated in partnership with Halprin’s husband, architect Lawrence Halprin in the late 1960s, The RSVP Cycles offers a model for collaborative working across disciplines. Particular to this model is a cyclical approach to making, through and across four key stages termed as: Resourcing (R), Scoring (S), Valu-action (V) and Performance (P). With this model in mind, we seek to un-do hierarchies between art forms and to celebrate collaborative responses to site, understanding our creative process to be continually unfolding.

When we begin working with a site, its edges or parameters become more defined through the practice – that is, through the acts of moving and scoring. Movement scores devised and moved in certain sites are collectively revised in the studio (or virtual space) and then folded back into the live realms of the project. These scores are not bound by project or performance deadlines but, rather, feed into months or possibly years of movement and photographic practice in a particular place. In this way for example, images generated from inhabiting certain sites might become the slide shows of the website which in turn fuel the resourcing cycle of movement-score writing and project reflection.

Artists

In 2009 Enter & Inhabit evolved into a collaborative project between dance artists Natalie Garrett Brown and Amy Voris, photographer Christian Kipp, and dancer and writer Niki Pollard. Sadly in 2010 Niki Pollard passed away. Her biography and contribution to the project is included here as a tribute to her life and work.

Natalie Garrett Brown is Head of Department for Music, Writing and Performance at University of East London, Vice Chair for DanceHE (Standing Conference of Dance in Higher Education) and founding Director for Coventry Dance. Her practice and research interests are situated within feminist understandings of embodied subjectivity and the ways in which somatic and reflective practices can inform education, performance making, creativity, writing and digital cultural practices. Natalie is co-convener of the International Conference for Dance & Somatic Practices, held biannually at Coventry University. She is also co-editor of Attending to Movement, Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World (2015) and founding associate editor for the Dance and Somatic Practices Journal.

Christian Kipp is a photographer based in Essex. He splits his time between working on his own in the landscape and collaborating with a variety of dance artists.

Niki Pollard was a Dartmoor-based dance artist and scholar. Her dance and writing work included postgraduate teaching and projects in schools and community settings. She recently completed a training in environmental movement practice with Helen Poynor and was on the editorial board for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. For tributes to Niki by members of the dance community please see www.rescen.net/archive/n_pollard.html

Amy Voris is a dance-maker based in Manchester. Her practice is process-oriented and collaborative, driven by the desire to develop enduring relationships with people and with movement material. Current projects include a site-responsive project (enter & inhabit), a collaboration with a jewellery maker (flockOmania) and a collaboration with Northwest-based artists exploring artist-led curation for experimental performance practices (Accumulations). In 2012, Amy completed training in Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy with Linda Hartley, a therapeutic approach to the body which also underlies her holistic and enquiring attitude toward making movement. Her doctoral research is concerned with investigating the processes of forming, returning to and deepening the relationship with movement material from the perspective of the dancer-maker, adopting Authentic Movement as a framework through which to practically explore this.
http://www.amyvoris.com

Emma Meehan is Assistant Professor in dance at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research, UK. Recurring themes in her work recently include site dance practice, the senses in creative participatory projects and Irish cultural heritage. A common thread is understanding how to host dialogues with audiences and participants, through conversation, movement and sharing food. From 2017-2020, she joined the enter & inhabit collective which undertook site dance in Coventry as part of Sensing the City with Amy Voris, Natalie Garrett Brown and Christian Kipp funded by AHRC.