›2000s

›The New Breeds 23/02/08 | Riley Theatre, Leeds, United Kingdom
Just as our ancestors were supported by wildlife, so we are supported by technology. Welcome to our digital evolution; experience these strange hybrids dancing like they’ve just been made. A Carol Brown commission for VERVE 08, the graduate performance company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, premiered at the Riley Theatre Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds 22 February 08 and toured the UK, Ireland, Finland, Netherlands visit http://www.article19.co.uk/06/feature/verve_08.php. Winner of 2008 International Theatre School Festival in Amsterdam Best International Production award.
›Dancing Aloud: A Performance Lecture
02/10/07 | TAPAC, Auckland, New Zealand
10 years, 41 collaborators, 21 dances, 22 countries. What remains of all those dances? Following a decade of performances around the world Carol Brown wrote to the dancers, architects, designers, composers, filmmakers and visual artists she has collaborated with and invited them to send a memory of their experience.  She moves through their memories, re-drawing a map of choreographies from Philadelphia to Finland, and from Cork to Calcutta, performing the archive and making audible its hidden stories. Premiered TAPAC, Tempo Dance Festival, Auckland, New Zealand 2nd Oct 2007.  Performed ICIA, Bath 16th Feb 2008; Adroitness, Arts Depot London 8 March 2008.
Sound—Russell ScoonesVideo—Abigail NorrisTexts—Shanti Freed, Simone Aughterlony, Catherine Gardner, Catherine Bennett, Vicky Manderson, Esther Rolinson, Delphine Gaborit, Lisa Torun, Dorita Hannah, Niki Cousineau, Gin MacCallum, Russell Scoones, Michael MannionPerformers—Carol Brown
›GLOW
03/04/07 | The Lightbox, Woking, United Kingdom
GLOW was the culmination of the award-winning Radiance project. A site sensitive multi-media event fusing light, movement, video, music and vocals. With a cast spanning a spectrum of ages, GLOW brought together a dynamic group of over 30 dancers and musicians - both professional and from the local community - to deliver a radiant collaborative spectacle. Performers included: dancers from Carol Brown Dances and StopGAP; Woking College Singers; and musicians from Planet People. Featuring original costumes by fashion designer, Davina Hawthorne, designed and created in collaboration with members of the local community. This site specific work offered audiences a unique experience of the new canalside gallery. As they journeyed from the gardens to the interior they encountered the unfolding of body stories inspired by the architecture, site and histories of Woking. GLOW concludes a two year programme RADIANCE, charting the construction period of The Lightbox through a series of performance events and educational programmes.  the process involved a large number of local people and professional artists.  It included workshops in primary schools, secondary schools, with local dancers, weekly costume making workshops, family dance workshops and music workshops.  The artists collaborated with the architect Julia Barfield and researched material for the performance from the historical collections and the aural history project of The Lightbox.
Music Direction—Russell ScoonesMusic Composition—Russell Scoones, Planet PeopleCostume Design—Davina HawthorneVideo—Abigail NorrisLighting Design—Sarah GilmartinPerformers—Carol Brown Dances: Catherine Bennett, Katsura Isobe, Suzanna Recchia, Raymond Roa, Delphine Gaborit, Pedro Machado; Stop Gap Dance Company: Lucy Bennett, Laura Jones, Chris Pavia, Dan Watson; The DeVyne Dancers and Local Performers: Rachel Walton, Amy Curr, Michele Cerflake, Ling Ling Chang, Laura Griffiths, Gail Brown, Liz Lyall, Julia Gerrard, Elena Foulkes, Georgia Hutchinson, Louise Cabban, Joanne Denman, Iris Partridge, Violet Clare, Pauline Holden, Pat Freeborn, Evelyn Armstrong, Pam Rowley, Heather Williams, Eve Heves, Liz Lennie and Maureen OdellMusicians—Melanie Wells (Cello), Robin Bushell (Violin), Juliet Hutchison (Double Bass and Flute); Woking College Singers: Chris Peters, Chris Ready, Jessica Brake, Frank Hanford; Planet People: Noreen Imrie, Damien Spitz, Pricilla Robinson, Kerry Sandy, Mary Clements, Gary McEvoy, Janey Ridley, John Mitchell, Peter Jones, Janet Bowyer, Janet Marshall, Tom Denham, Wendy Shaw, Frank Road, Justin LloydCommissioned By—Woking Dance Festival & The Lightbox
›SeaUnSea 12/10/06 | Siobhan Davies Studios, London, United Kingdom
A real-time interactive performance and installation in a constantly evolving virtual sea. Set under the wave-like ceiling of the Siobhan Davies Studio, the movements of audience and performers impact on the environment becoming entangled in a synthetic seascape. Captured within these fleeting forms the performers play and explore, attracting, repulsing and entwining their actions within the evolving patterns of a swirling hypnotic sea. The event  runs in cycles during which time visitors are invited to ‘play’ in the installation, watch the performance, then once again inhabit the space. Premiered October 12-15 at Siobhan Davies Studios for Dance Umbrella. Performed ENTER UNKNOWN TERRITORIES International Festival & Conference for New Technology Art 25-29 April 2007 Cambridge (UK).
Sometimes the live movement is very slow and voluptuous, at other times it is fast and knotty, but always the dancers have a lucious, fluid and grounded quality; while they share a vulnerability in their movement, the presence of the technology is so unassuming, so sensitive to what the dancers are doing, that we could forget it is there at all. The effect that is created through the combination of dance and digital imagery is highly emotive and even visceral at times. Thomsen's patterns resemble growing organisms, swarming insects, unfurling blossoms, rapidly spreading coral reefs.... Images from nature and the restless, timeless sea and the busy life it contains are conjured up, as well as developing embryos and multiplying cells. —Leask, J. (2006). Deep Brown sea: Carol Brown rides the tech wave. Flash Journal, 11-3. ... an intriguing, ever-changing work of art that leaves an enormous catalogue of images (some of which reminded me of the abstract paintings of Victor Pasmore) imprinted in the memory. —Graham Watts
Architecture—Mette Ramsgard-ThomsenLighting Design—Michael MannionMusic—Alistair MacDonaldPerformers—Anna Williams, Marina Collard, Matthew Smith
›Deep and Beneath: Dance Installation 21/09/06 | HUB Roundhouse Studios, London, United Kingdom
Deep and beneath Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s OCEAN, a multi-media dance installation for the HUB. Culminating out of the Summer Workshop programme at the Roundhouse (14-18 August 06) and taking its inspiration from the creative processes used in making OCEAN, deep and beneath combines dance, poetry, moving image and sound in a multi media event. Responding to the concept of OCEAN as something vast, immersive and deep, the installation features the movements, words and musics of local young people as they ‘swim’ within the ocean of digital communications and move within urban tides of action. Workshop participants generate dance, music, text and imagery through interactions with technology pushing the expressive languages of the body. (21 – 24 September 6.30-8pm).
›Aarero Stone
04/03/06 | Soundings Theatre, Wellington, New Zealand
An enduring lament for the living inscribed with love. How do we care for the strangely familiar and mourn the distant dead? Tongues of Stone is hard talk, and the stone tongue is the speaking landscape. Colin McMahon referred to New Zealand as “a landscape with too few lovers”. How do we recover romance in such a place? Talking in forgotten languages with their remote rites. Aarero Stone performs an archaeology of buried voices, resonating from two cosmologies, Maori and European.  Loosening the tongue of frozen speech, geology becomes mythology: Sibyl’s voice endures as her body disappears within a cave, Niobe turns to stone in mourning for her dead children, the women of Belstone are petrified as punishment for dancing on the Sabbath. Cracking open the stone tongue with a resounding adze: the fallen soldier becomes memorialised in a granite tomb, the Maori warrior dances for the dead, the trained performer mourns the loss of his cultural body. Fed by rivers of stories, one world leaks into another. Rather than a place of too few lovers we find the lovers are many, distant and near.
What Hannah and Brown present in the moving images and moments of Aarero Stone is a lamentation on a universal scale: one where we find perspective on our troubles by identifying with the suffering of ‘the other.’ —Trubridge, S. (2007, Winter/Spring). Beyond the veil. Theatre Forum, (30), 3-10. Carol Brown was spellbinding in Aarero Stone where she examined themes of lamentation and myth. In an austere pageant of dance poetry, Brown told stories of women: tragic, bold and clandestine. —Horsley, F. (2007). Aarero Stone. The Listener.
Performance Design—Dorita HannahCollaborating Artist—Charles KoronehoSound—Russell ScoonesLighting—WandaPerformers—Carol Brown, Charles KoronehoCommissioned By—New Zealand International Arts Festival
›Her Topia
07/10/05 | Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance, Athens, Greece
A Dance Architecture Event for The Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance Research Kopanos, Athens, Greece, 7-8 October 2005. Inspired by the unique building at Kopanos designed by Isadora and Raymond Duncan as a utopic place for dancing, Her Topia was a specially commissioned work for the Centre. Isadora Duncan created the distinction of dance as an art form for the 20th century and asserted the freedom of a woman dancing. What does it mean to be a woman dancing in the 21st century? Choreographer, Carol Brown and Designer, Dorita Hannah, explored concepts of freedom and fashion as seventeen women performers go liberty hunting. Weaving their audience through the inside and outside of this unique building the performers created a journey through ancient and contemporary images. Dancing their body stories into the stones of this historic place with precise abandonment, and projecting these dances out into the cityscape of Athens through multiple reflections, using light, video and mirrors, the performers created a heterotopia, a place of other spaces. For further information about this work, read Dorita Hannah’s photographic essay, Her Topia, A Dance-Architecture Event for The Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance Research, Kopanos, Athens, Greece, 7-8 October 2005, in Hannah, Dorita and Harslof, Olav (eds) Performance Design (2008) Museum Tusculanum pp.197-210.
Conception—Carol Brown (Choreography), Dorita Hannah (Design)Production—Penelope Iliasko Lighting Design—Thomas Economacos Video Art—Christos Hasapis Multi-media Art—Makis Faros Research Assistants—Efrosini Protopapa, Hannah DaviesPerformers—Frosso Voutsina, Anna Daskalou, Delphine Gaborit, Anneta Kouvelioti, Irida Kyriakopoulou, Atalanti Mouzouri, Gogo Petrali, Marilena Petridou, Evridiki Samara, Takako Segawa, Vanesa Spinasa, Ioanna Toumpakari, Giota Tsagri, Anastasia TsonouCommissioned By—British Council
›Topos
21/09/05 | The LightBox Construction Site, Woking, United Kingdom
A site sensitive event which marked the space and celebrated the start of the construction of the new Lightbox (formerly Woking Galleries). Carol Brown worked with an inter-generational cast of 23 performers and a live string ensemble to create a stone foundation ceremony, marking the building site with light, voice and movement. Topos was performed to an audience of over 200 people against a backdrop of construction machinery and on the site of the new art gallery. It incorporated state-of-the-art wearable lighting designed especially for the performance . The piece was performed by children from the New Monument School in Maybury, the DeVyne Dancers from The Vyne Community Centre in Knaphill and Carol Brown Dances. Musicians from Planet People (Lockwood Day Centre) performed live and recorded music under the direction of Russell Scoones. With support from ACE Arts Plus Award. For further information visit www.thelightbox.org.uk
Concept & Choreography—Carol BrownLight Artist—Ulli OberlackMusic—Russell ScoonesRecorded Music—Composed and Performed by Planet PeoplePerformers—Raymond Roa, Katsura Isobe, Susanna Recchia; Dancers from New Monument School: Afrida Ahmed, Sadia Ahmed, Naheem Akhtar, James Champion, Nathan Durbridge, Uzma Gull, Iqra Khalid, Malika Macholowe, Tehmor Mahmood, Iqra Nabbi, Ali Noor, Qasim Noor, Iram Tassawar, Sheryl Wilson; The DeVyne Dancers: Evelyn Armstrong, Claire Chambers, Violet Clare, Pat Freeborn, Pauline Holden, Liz Lennie, Eileen Martin, Maureen O'Dell, Iris Patridge, Heather Smith, Anne StoryCommissioned By—Woking Dance Festival and The Lightbox
›The Changing Room
04/11/04 | Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany
An intimate performance event combining real and virtual spaces created by Carol Brown in collaboration with Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. Three women inhabit a room within which a haunting virtual presence mirrors, distorts and extends their behaviour. Innovative performance technology at the edge of the real. The Changing Room is a real time interactive performance event intertwining the digital and the visceral in a sublime trio. In their changing room, three women leave behind the territory they know for another place, beyond what they know. A mirror becomes a screen for their mutations, a curtain a technological frontier and their table a platform for the puppetry of the virtual. Through a series of changing viewpoints the audience is lead to encounter the epic within the everyday, as a haunting virtual presence extends, mirrors and distorts the performer's behaviour. Animating the threshold between the virtual and the real, The Changing Room is an intimate exploration of our digital evolution. Designed for both live art and theatre spaces, The Changing Room encourages the shifting viewpoints of a mobile audience. (Ludvig Forum, Aachen, Germany 4-5 June 2004; Dance Umbrella, Greenwich Dance Agency 4-6 November 2004).
... stunning… strange and thrilling. —Williams, A. (2009). The Changing Room. The work which really stood out for me in Dance Umbrella for its boldness and imagination was "The Changing Room," … the three women performers are like pioneers on the verge of discovering a brave new world. —Leask, J. (2004). The Changing Room. Carol Brown defines for me what it means to be an innovative artist, once again she has collaborated with different complex and artistic groups to create astonishing work. —Ludwig, I. (2000). The Changing Room. Ludwig Forum.
Digital Architecture & Design—Mette Ramsgard ThomsenMusic—Jerome SoudanProgramming—Chiron MottramCostumes—Shanti FreedPerformers—Carol Brown, Catherine Bennett, Delphine GaboritCommissioned By—Ludwig Forum
›ROOM 29/07/04
A remix of The Changing Room, for the Royal Opera House's Clore Studio Upstairs as part of Snagged and Clored season 29-30 July 2004.
›between two/zwischen zwei 05/02/04 | Bonnie Bird Theatre, London, United Kingdom
between two/zwischen zwei is an homage to the early work of Gertrud Bodenwieser within a musical landscape by Gustav Mahler. Choreography by Carol Brown. Performed by Delphine Gaborit and Leon Baugh of Mano Creates. With Lighting and Video Design by James Leadbitter. Performed at Bonnie Bird Theatre, Laban, London 5-6 February 2004In making this duet I have sought to create a visceral link between the past and the present. As a process this has involved an immersion in the fragmentary traces of Bodenwieser's legacy through photographs, dancer's journals, film and corporeal knowledge. I passed on what I knew about the practices of Gertrud Bodenwieser and her involvement in the expressionist theatre of 1920s and 1930s Vienna to Leon and Delphine. In this way we have created a matrix of interconnections through which the ideas and dramaturgies of Bodenwieser have informed the present. Mahler has been an abiding companion on this journey of re-membering. Beyond this, Between Two/zwischen zwei is as much about what happened in the studio between us as what the vicissitudes of history have bequeathed. —Carol BrownChoreography—Carol BrownPerformers—Delphine Gaborit, Leon BaughMusic—Gustav Mahler: Symphony 1, Third Movement; Lieder eines Farhrenden Gesellen, die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz; Symphony 3, Fourth Movement, “O Mensch”.Lighting &Video Design—James LeadbetterSound Arrangement—Patrick DrummCostume Design—Bronia HousmanArchival Material—Hilary NapierManagement—Helen ShuteCommissioned By—Mano Crates
›Crevice 24/01/04 | Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, USA
Beyond wreckage, two women find themselves in a surreal landscape of competing desires - a Crevice - where things both float and fall, toward an illusion of progress. Created in Germany and Philadelphia, Crevice is a collaboration between Carol Brown and dance-artists, Niki Cousineau and Gin MacCallum. With music by Jorge Cousineau and Mattias Petzold, and film shot by Alan Mehlbrech. Performed at Dance Boom, Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia 24 January-8 February 2004.
›Electric Fur 09/12/03 | The Place Theatre, London, United Kingdom
In Electric Fur we have worked with a perspectiveless void to create a series of deep surfaces animated by waves of sensation and memory. Two bodies are infected by shifting states of energy. Electric Fur is part of the Capture Installations Tour 2004/05; also exhibited at tanzmedial: Installationen, Fotografien, Filme. SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln, Germany 9 December 2003 - 1 February 2004; British Council Platform 1, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania, May 2004. Choreography—Carol BrownVideography—Abigail NorrisPhotography—Mattias EkSound Art—Jerome Soudan [Mimetic]Screen Designer & Maker—Ed KingPerformers—Jo Fong, Catherine GardnerSupported By—Arts Council of England Capture Award
›Spawn 23/10/03
Spawn is a performance event that comprises solo, duet and trio dances. Incorporating live and virtual spaces it takes place within the framework of an interactive architectural environment.
›Crazy Beat 26/07/03 Music video for BLUR
›Touch Tower 20/06/03 | Prague Quadriennale, Prague, Czech Republic
The Touch Tower formed one section of a much larger performance event, Heart of the Senses for the Prague Quadriennale of Theatre Architecture and Scenography, 2003. The installation was one of five scaffolding towers each representing a different sense and organised around a long table bound within an undulating timber landscape. As a part of this larger event, choreography and design sought to intertwine the physiological structure of the body, with its history as a material object and cultural artefact. Stitching itself into the landscape, the tower formed a vertiginous panoptic, an anatomical theatre focussing on the body, laid out on a slab or suspended within a viewing slot.  In acknowledging the influence of technology on the senses, it created a mediated sensorium referencing the long distance touch of contemporary medical science and communication technologies as well as the prosthetic extension of the body. The Tower folded the audience into the work, inviting them to inhabit a range of postures and physical orientations whilst encountering the live  and mediated actions. Spatially and sensorially these were intended to induce a reorientation of perception, turning the insides out and shifting their relationship from being outside the work as spectators or visitors to becoming participants and themselves subjects within the work. 
Architecture—Dorita HannahDramaturgy—Tomas ZizekProduction—Pavel StorekLighting—Michael MannionSupported By—British Council and Theatre Instistute Prague, http://pq.scape.org.nz
›Maybe: A duet for a man and a woman swallowed by space 04/04/03 | Birmingham Hippodrome, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Maybe. A duet for a man and a woman swallowed by space. Commission for Bare Bones, Birmingham Dance Exchange, Birmingham. National Tour March 2003-January 2004.
Choreography—Carol BrownOriginal Music—Russell ScoonesCostuming—GaryPerformers—Vicky Manderson, Leon Baugh
›Bodenwieser at the Beach or, Migration and Memory 02/12/01 | Michaelis Theatre, Roehamptom, United Kingdom
In the reaches of my embodied memory a figure is held in language and in gesture.  She is re-membered in certain movements, and habits of style. Composed of fragments, of memory, mythology and history, her image is less biography than biomythography, for I never knew her, yet I know her still. Bodenwieser at the Beach or, Migration and Memory is a performance lecture based on the work and life of Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890-1959) and the corporeal tracings of her legacy found in the teachings of Shona Dunlop MacTavish. Performed as part of the Centre for Performance Research:  Grounded in Europe Past Masters event, University of Roehampton, 30 Nov-2 Dec 2001.  It was performed again as part of AID Les Archives Internationale de la Danse 1931-51 Research Conference.  Centre National de la Danse, Paris, 1 April, 3.30pm, 2006.
Performers—Carol Brown
›My Sweet Animalia 04/03/03
›Nerve 02/04/02 | British Dance Edition, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Because this city is too large and formless to make sense of as a whole, I have made an irrational short-cut, a track through it. Inside this private city I built a grid of reference points and mapped bits of the body (our bodies) to these points. Each point enshrines a personal moment of the history of touch between us. This space has been twisted to see how far I can push it. Nerve was initially researched and developed with the assistance of a Jerwood Award in Choreography in 2000. It was subsequently developed with funding support from London Arts and through Carol Brown's AHRB Research Fellowhip in the Creative and Performing Arts hosted through the dance programme at the University of Surrey Roehampton. Nerve premiered at the British Dance Edition 2002 on 2 February.
Choreography & Text—Carol BrownArchitecture—Stewart DoddSound—Russell Scoones, NorscqManagement—Gwen van SpijkPerformers—Carol Brown, Grant McLay/Matthew Smith
›Sleeping in Public 18/11/01 | Battersea Arts Centre, Battersea, United Kingdom
In the shadow of the living light an inert body lies sleeping and a woman’s voice is seen speaking. At the polar opposite of his inertia, her body rides the surfaces of the city detailing night visions of sensual unrest. Together with the duet, Nerve, Sleeping in Public is part of Carol Brown’s research into the architecture of movement and is supported by an AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts. Wandsworth Dance Festival at Battersea Arts Centre, 2+4 Days in Motion 7th International Theatre FEstival 16th-21 Oct 2002, Divadlo Ponec, Husitská 24A, Praha 3.
... frenetic movements… became an unstoppable, mesmerizing flow. —Miriam Seidel, The Philadelphia Inquirer Her own first solo, danced between two fiercely focused beams of light, takes us instantly to a place of neon and night-time… She is a one-woman light show, flickering with electricity, barely human in Michael Mannion’s lighting. —The Guardian
Music—Russell ScoonesLighting—Michael MannionPerformers—Carol Brown
›The Idea of Sea 31/05/01 | Arts Bank, Philadelphia, USA
Strata, Sprawl and the video dance, The Idea of Sea commissioned by Group Motion Dance Company, Philadelphia. Commissioned By—Group Motion Dance Company, Philadelphia
›Machine For Living 04/10/00 | Brighton Corn Exchange, Brighton, United Kingdom
A LIQUID ARCHITECTURAL STATE
70 min installation performance for 5 performers. Sculpting with space, light, movement and metal, Carol Brown and Esther Rolinson create a multi-dimensional environment in which the bodies of the performers and the fabric of the space become an immersive sensory experience. A dark metallic forest cut with light and animation becomes a visceral machine offering fleeting insights into privately inhabited spaces. The spectator makes a physical journey, composing their own stories from glimpsed moments and fragmented human exchanges. Solid barriers dissolve; flickering images crystallise into human forms; forms coalesce into individual portraits; transient encounters accumulate, allowing relationships to build; movement pathways take on the concentrated patterns of the city; a resonant urban mediascape takes shape. (Performances: Hamburg and Aachen, Germany 12-19 March 2003; Dance Umbrella 8-10 November 2001; World Premiere: 4 October 2000 Brighton Corn Exchange). Original Score—Pete M. Wyer Lighting Design—Michael Mannion.Performers—Carol Brown, Charlotte Derbyshire, James Flynn, Grant Maclay, Mathew Smith
›The Lift 23/05/00
Travelling in a lift demands social protocol of the highest order, but what happens when you are ready to crack? A humorous drama of one woman's triumph over suits, bicycle couriers and claustrophobia.   Commissioned by BBC 2 for DANCE FOR CAMERA 2000. Premiered May 2000. Screened BBC2 December 2001.
Direction—Jane ThorburnChoreography—Carol BrownPerformers—Emma Gladstone, Simone Aughterlony.Soundtrack—Russell Scoones.Commissioned By—Dance Film commissioned by BBC 2
›The View From Here 22/03/00
›The 19th Step 09/04/08 | Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton, United Kingdom
On THE  NINETEENTH STEP of  a basement staircase in a building about to be demolished in downtown Buenos Aires, writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an aleph, a point in space that contains all other points (past, present and future). From this step we imagine a vast, exhilarating library where all possible languages are sited.  Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy performs alongside an ensemble of outstanding dancers and musicians to create a complex patterning of spaces, layering understandings of time, numbers and relationships within a Borges’ inspired quest for infinity. (Performed Boundstone Community College Hall, Lancing, West Sussex 11th April; Laban Studio Theatre London 12th April). Visit the website for the project www.the19thstep.co.uk
CollaboratorsComposition—Dorothy KerMathematician—Marcus du SautoyVisual Art—Kate AllenLighting—Michael MannionPerformers—Marina Collard (dancer), Marcus du Sautoy, Sarah Bennington (flute), Dylan Elmore (dancer), Rosemary Martin (dancer), Richard Steggall (horn) and Scott Wilson (percussion)Commissioned By—EPSRC