(IN) POSSIBILITIES OF CONNECTING
The Workroom, Glasgow and DanceBase, Edinburgh.
During these two residencies, Romany will keep company to and simultaneously be accompanied by the many layers, complexities, fragmentation and organized chaos that is her dance practice. She will follow her intuition, leaning into sensing, moving from the floor, resting and giving in, defying gravity & resisting verticality, falling and falling some more, shaking, sweating, connecting, vibrating & hydrating. Romany will give time to the continuation of the research and development of a fictional archetype or living species that she is calling “The Connector”, exploring the impossibility of closeness through a hybrid of movement, words, cables and carriers. This work is informed by her recent research around companionship planting (specifically The Three Sisters), exploring support, relationality, inter-dependence and the possibilities for symbiotic coexistence within structures of three. Romany will also dedicate some of the residency to her current movement research called: “Sound Bodies” – an ongoing collaboration between herself and a bell mask, between a dear friend and our mutual material kinks, an encounter that exists across Scotland and Colombia – a sensory relationship between suede and copper, a dance of both pain and pleasure, a meeting of silence and noise, deep cleaning and dribble.
Boundary Objects: pleasure is the desired horizon, The CCA.
This workshop will offer invitations, exercises and scores that seek pleasure making moments, (understanding, that pleasure is no simple place, and that pleasure seeking looks, feels, moves and manifests very differently for each one of us) This workshop poses pleasure as the desired horizon, accepting that we may not reach the horizon (es), but it is the desire, the intention and the dream. Through what Romany calls Boundary Objects, (inspired and informed both by the work of Lygia Clarks, Relational Objects and by her recent collaborations with Juan Beatncuth). This workshop will begin from the place after falling, understanding falling as a metaphor for and as a practice of precarity, of losing control, of feeling, of moving and of being moved by. From and in a place of rest and horizontality - we will seek pleasure - from the floor level - from the ground level - from looking at the stars' level.
Performing Deviance:
Side by side, above and below, in pleasure and pain: In collaboration with Juan Betancurth, Laura Fisher and Emilia Beatriz.
Sitting with a deep pain in your lower body, perhaps a pain that you live with and have always lived with, a chronic pain, or a pain that comes and goes monthly, or a pain that you desired and seeked out and / or perhaps a pain your feeling for the first time. Your mouth is full of the taste of something warm and gooey and it lingers in the space below your tongue, your left toe sticks out of a small hole in your sock, it’s irritating but bearable, you try not to focus on it, but however hard you try, the feeling is present. Simultaneously your body is still hot and tingly from an intimate moment that you lived previous to arriving to this talk and each time your phone vibrates in your pocket, something sparkles in your body.
From this place, side by side, above and below, in presence and absence, in simultaneous pain and pleasure, swirling through a fog of sensations, layered with nuances, this conversation begins.
Colombian visual artist Juan Betancuth and Glasgow based performance artist Laura Fisher are invited into dialogue to share and converse around the places or the edges or the folds in the skin and the body where pain and pleasure may exist together. Both artists will speak about their proximities to this and around the idea of “performing deviance” within and across their lives, lived and felt experiences and artistic practices.
