UNBECOMING

 

Thursday 14th July 2016: 10 am – 5pm, York City Centre

A York Dance Collective event

Organised by Chris Beale

Inspired by the work of Frank Willens

 

Not dance.  Not street entertainment.  Not a flash mob.  Not performance art.  Not exactly.

 

How might you move down the street in a different way to normal?  Or stop differently?  Would it be possible to allow for a way of being in public that includes the absurd and the nonsensical?  Using no props, just our bodies, we will spend a day in central York doing just this: carrying out a range of actions that involve moving or behaving in socially unusual ways.  A particular inspiration for the day is the choreographer Frank Willens.  I was particularly taken with a film that documented an event he ran in Leeds last year (which I was not part of):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL2ydlRCBJg

 

I am convening a group of people who are interested in bringing these ideas to York for the day.  The day will be a mix of studio preparations and open-air interventions in York city centre.  We will all contribute ideas and bring them to fruition.  It would suit people who are willing to get a bit dirty and interact in highly physical ways with the urban environment. 

 

If you do something that’s too obviously 'other', then it’s no longer 'other', it becomes a performance, it becomes something that we know what it is: ‘Oh, they’re performing’, ‘Oh, they’re dancers’, or whatever, it’s not that interesting to me.  Why bother doing something in a public space if you’re just going to have it be dismissed or accepted or compartmentalised into something that’s already known?  So we’re playing with this friction, this more open idea about what these things could be.  If you leave it as open as possible, then these kinds of associations and ideas can come to people, and they can define it, they can have a relationship to it…

FRANK WILLENS