Follow the drop down menus for details on individual 'laboratories'.

 

25-26 June 2016, Green Screen Studio, and Digital Performance Lab, MediaCity UK

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Participants: Barnaby King (Edge Hill University);Lucy Amsden (Birmingham University) and academic/stand up performer Christopher Molineux, (PhD Candidate, Brunel University).

 

The first laboratory explored 'Clown Performances To Clown Interventions', surveying clowning practices and positioning the research in a lineage of hospital and Elder Clown, before considering in virtual contexts and digital media. With a leading, experienced clown practitioner, Ian Cameron, Talbot and Clare Dormann, a games design specialist re-considered clowning approaches that had been developed in performance interactions with people with advanced dementia who were resident in care homes in Scotland, as part of a study led by the University of Stirling in collaboration with the arts organisation Hearts & Minds (Edinburgh).

The two-day laboratory reconfigured performance exercises for screen interaction. Attendant discussions considered ethical issues around devising online 'Theatres of Engagement' (Lavender, 2017) for participants with diminished cognition. Practitioners and researchers (from Edge Hill University, Brunel University and Birmingham University, and students of performance from the University of Salford worked with Talbot, Dormann and Cameron. In this workshops were the beginnings of production of memes, scripts and simple interactions around domestic themes (folding sheets, dressing) and personal life-events (meeting, greeting, getting married). Time-constrained sketches emerged as a form of visual 'joke', as did slapstick performance without words. A dialogue with Arthur Pedlar, a senior clown practitioner, still practising and teaching internationally in his 80s, brought these sketches into the context of simple clown slapstick seen at the Blackpool Tower circus and in classic sketches from the French circus, familiar to Pedlar. The meeting informed the tone of interaction with the target audience and specific cultural references.