The labs will be co-facilitatd by several artists who have agreed to group their ideas within a collaborative frame-work and will be woven together from the following proposals:

1. Gesture and semiotics
James Morrow

James Morrow
Description:
How do images and words work when they are both present?

Goals:
I'm curious to play with participants and see what takes place when we create gestures together and how those gestures shift or don't shift based on the music chosen.  

Methodology:
This will be a movement based intensive where participants create together a series of phrases, perform then for each other, break them down (what did you see), reflect, and (re)create...

2.Archiving the body
Maré Hieronimus, Sharon Mansur, and Danielle Russo

Maré Hieronimus & Sharon Mansur
Springing from a collaborative work-in-progress improvisational duet investigation titled “topology,” this Laboratory will focus on the notion of continuous change in relationship to public verses, private realities, and inner/outer awareness.
One definition for Topology is: any continuous change (in mathematics) that can be continuously undone.   (source: Professor Robert Bruner, Wayne State University)
Using this as both a springboard and a metaphor, and the body as a laboratory for exploration and experimentation, we initiate/put forth the following questions:
-How much can you change something, and it still remain in essence what it was?
-At what point does the thing being altered actually become something different from what it originally was?  
-What is essence, and is essence indestructible in some way- or unable to bealtered- is it in fact malleable at all?
-What are the parameters and agents of change?  
-Are they different for each unique individual, or are there common threads that link the process of transformation together?

Using this framework for further investigation we will also be looking at notions of public verses and private and inner/outer realities.
-What is the difference between the inner and outer reality – the inner structure and the (outer) form that structure takes?  How do we define this?
-When you alter the outer form- does/can this act/transform the inner essence, and
vice versa?  
-When you alter the public persona- how does this affect the private persona, and
vice versa?  
-What is the relationship of continuous change to the public/private persona?   
-Is it actually possible to continuously change a public persona, and then in doing so alter one’s private essence?

Goals:
To explore our Lab questions in collaboration with participants
To create a stimulating space for exploration
To support open conversation and creative investigation
To support movement experiments, observation/witnessing, discussions, writings, visual art reflections while in creative practice together
To create a record of this process for future contemplation and inspiration

Methodology:
 We hope to encompass multiple approaches including:  movement exploration and investigation, structured improvisations, observing/witnessing, dialogue, visual art and written reflections.

Danielle Russo

Description:
The body is a fluid container of memory. How does the body enliven this simultaneous past and present? How can its trace be realized in the "now"?
"Tracing the 'now'" is a practice of realizing the embodied "self" and its archival of sensation. This course will serve as a physical laboratory where we will thread together the utility of our fleeting, immediate movement with shadows and tastes of the enduring and always collecting precedent.
We will question:
a) What does our body remember?
b) Why does it remember?
c) How does it remember?
d) How can our past not only be sensationalized in our muscles and on our skin, but be traced within and throughout our present studio and performance practices?
e) How can memory be awakened, transmitted and exchanged between performer and his/her audience?   

Preferred Setting:
I am interested in practicing both inside a traditional dance studio, and at other times, in unconventional locations (ie: a public intersection of pedestrian life, a quiet and private setting in nature, etc, etc.)

Goals:
I hope to stimulate a deeper sense of "self" both in studio practice and its relational performance practice. How can the body dig within its own library of sensations and experiences to actualize movement practiced in the present? How can corporeal reflection(s) reinforce the communication of ideas when shared in relationship to both adjoining dancing and non-dancing bodies?

Methodology:
I will design the course over a series of classes (4 - 5) that will firstly integrate the direction of sequential exercises for warming the body, followed by:
a) Directed individual improvisations
b) Directed partnered improvisations
c) Directed group improvisations
d) Group dialogue
e) Potential performance of the research generated and explored.

3. Installation
Erika Brash and Mariana Papaqui Briones

Erika Brash
Description:
This lab is designed to explore, investigate, experiment and improvise with the use of installation art and dance, from its different aspects, such as the site-specific (spaces), specific-objects (materials), happenings, actions and movements, respectively.
 Using as a model for my piece “de/construcción”, and as tools, processes of development of this work, whose generating engine is the construction of forms using light, color, texture and the position of the elements that constitute it.
 To continue with this procedure will allow participants to develop or acquire creative possibilities. For this, I propose the use of experiences arising from the exploration of dance and art installation based on the elements I listed. In general, this is a proposal that does not create objects, but environments, environments of emotional and sensory experiences.

Goals:
My interest arises from the concern to explore the perception of the world parting from the shape, the relationship between the elements that create the choreographic form and the way in which these take the form of installation and try to find the point of convergence between the two. To discover how they can live and work together in order to achieve the creation of artistic proposals.
The main goal is to generate a very specific situation where the objects and movement are not separated in the artistic action, but think and are projected in relation to the elements that come together.

Methodology:

Mariana Papaqui Briones
Description:
This project is presented to develop composition through lab work playing with ideas that arise from a physical space. It will also take into account their characteristics and its meaning to re-utilize and re-signify them towards a scenic space with the help of installed objects within the same movement proposal whether they are corporal or material.
We will use of imagery and photography as a tool to build movement.

Goals:
Develop a visual body composition through laboratory work.
Widen the tools of interaction and stage performance in different spaces.
To open a space to analyze, document, and share interpretative and creative processes among artists.

TOPICS AND WORK PLAN.
Laboratory:
Floor based warm-up.
Basic Techniques in aerial dance.
Image analysis and interaction with space.
Improvisation and directed movement building.
This provides for three sessions each lasting 2 hours.
In a laboratory divided into four sessions of 2 hours. A total of 8 full hours (taking into account the duration of the meeting). It is noteworthy that the initial proposal is open to adapt in time and schedule, as suggested by the organizing committee of Performática
Discussion:
After each session, participants will be given a sheet to express some brief comments about the processes addressed during the lab, these will be given back to participants the day of the discussion.

Methodology:
This project arises as a laboratory with interest in obtaining material of composition, which could also be useful to an investigation regarding the visual images of mobile and immobile body around a given spatial and situational significance.

4. Dance and the Camera.
Rachael L. Shaw, Samuel Hanson

Description: This laboratory would be a place to explore the merger of site-specific improvisation and improvisational camera work as seeds for a screendance piece. Rather than being focused on capturing specific movements from a specific angle, the camaerperson(s) will investigate ways of actively filming work. At the same time, the dancer(s) will be involved in an improvisational score, exploring how to involve the camera without "performing" for it or ignoring it. In other words, both the dancers and the cameraperson(s) are both acting and reacting to one another, being present in the moment. This lab will investigate how and when ideas of improvisational dance carry-over into the filming process and vice-versa. We will also explore the power dynamics implicit in being behind/in front of a camera and the relationships between capacities or incapacities of various bodies and cameras. Participants should bring some kind of recording device...cell phone, digital camera with video capabilities, video camera, etc.

5. Multidisciplinary
Zap McConnell/THE UNEARTHING crew

Description: This laboratory will be an introduction into some of the main themes of The Unearthing: energy, borders, exchange, identity and unearthing the past. Through improvisational scores we will explore our relationship to the “natural” world and the cultural environment that we exist in and how these things define us as individuals.

Digging into some of the same scores and questions that we posed while creating The Unearthing we ask ourselves: What is cultural identity? Why is it important? When does it cause division? Do you know where your energy comes from? Where do you perceive borders within yourself and the world?

To help us along this journey, we will be moving in the campus gardens with live music.

6. Physical Theater
Nick Bryson, Jeff Wallace, and David Silva

Nick Bryson and Jeff Wallace.
Description: This is a lab resulting from a conversation around the paradoxes implicit in directing improvisation sessions, conceived by Nick Bryson and Jeff Wallace. Nick and Jeff established a creative collaborative relationship with regard to facilitating improvisation sessions after meeting during a residency of Legitimate Bodies Dance Company to Purdue State University in Indiana, USA, in April 2011. They decided as a result of their dialogue to make parallel applications to Performatica 2012. This has been an inspiring step for both especially as they have maintained a contact across the Atlantic on Skype, making time for further conversations in busy lives.
The material investigated in this laboratory follows on from the more 'led' workshop format proposed to taking place over the first two days of Performatica. What is being proposed here has the concept of co-leadership or group leadership at its core. The proposal also makes no sense if participants in the workshop are not going deeper into the concept of a group practice. The laboratory questions accepted conventions within ‘our world’ of contemporary improvising dance by questioning the very directing of improvisation.  It will be centred around the core questions below which we hypothesise inevitably result in paradoxes.

1. How might we give instructions as facilitators?
2. What motivations might we have in giving these instructions?
3. When and where do we give them?

We feel this is an ideal vehicle to get deeper in our art practice as well as renew it. Every member of the laboratory may contribute for an agreed meaning to be developed. Every one must find their own questions and assert their own personal agency.
Using the general curious maxim of “a paradox does not stop me from dancing” we will encourage the highlighting of paradox as even a way to sustain a group improvisational practice within the laboratory.
We anticipate that we will end up realizing that a ‘good’ facilitator of dance improvisation sessions would have to appeal to meditation or at least a meditative sense before a session to remove individual will and uncover a group will in order that a session becomes transformative in nature at the end. This involves saying nothing while the improvisation is actually taking place. We may unearth this principle as the key principle to work with during our laboratory sessions.

Goals:
In discussions it has become clear that in many ways it is the problemization of improvisation that is the problem. Why do we not just let sleeping dogs lie and continue blissfully ignorant of the potential paradoxes around dance improvisation in a formal setting? The aim here is to allow for time to go deeper by shedding light on them. The goals are to liberate our view of improvisation, to dialogue, open up and expose our views on improvisation, to find our own concepts, own approaches and experimental questions.

The suggested structuring of the Performatica Forum in 2012 is in fact an improvisation in itself, an important goal for this laboratory is to mirror the process of the whole forum within the laboratory. The container will, we envisage, be able to encompass the shifting natural tides and moods as dthe week goes by from excitement and anticipation, to engagement and creativity out of familiarity and working relationships.

David Silva Carreto
Description:
Exploration of the physical elements for the dramatic and theatrical creation, using dance as a driving force of the narrative.
Awareness of one for another, the relationship of the performer with the space-time and others, music as dramaturgic generator. Symbology as a complement for performance.

Goals:
The goal is to explore the body’s physical elements and their relationship with space and speed, developing an aware relationship of time-space.
Another goal is for participants to develop a dramaturgy based on breathing, speed and the distribution of bodies in space; taking into account factors such as support, impulse, contact, and movement based on imbalance, tension and distention of the body, seeking for a creation of self.

7. Questioning performance
Lindsey Ann Drury

Description:
Performance is a problematic thing: It is a problem to need to be witnessed by an audience, it is a problem to try to do something well, it is a problem to desire to share art, and it is a problem to hope to be special. Further, it is a problem to attempt all of that within cultures that are so unsure in the first place about the purpose of art.

The function of this Lab is to investigate how the problems of making art can also empower artists and inform artistic processes. After all, these problems provide reasons to make dances, and they provide the foils for every dance we make.

We live in an era obsessed with problem solving, in societies that seem to be impotent to solve their own problems. As funding for the arts continues to diminish, artists are increasingly asked to validate the social purpose of their work. As artists, we have been asked to express what good we do for our troubled societies. As Basquiat once said, however, “I haven't met that many refined people. Most people are generally crude.” In this laboratory, we consider alternatives to making art as a way to be good. What is art as a laboratory for the embodiment of problems? As so much performance art goes in the direction of expressing and exploring our social demons, it seems appropriate to consider the value of such transgressions.

All artists present at Performatica who self-identify their work as within the terms of the laboratory are welcome to show videos and other archival documentation of their work as a part of this laboratory. From there, the laboratory can serve as a community forum for discussing and experimenting with these various methods of artistic process.

Questions can include:
What does it mean to create a work of art as catastrophe?
When an artwork pursues the discomfort of its audience, what relationships between artwork and audience can be developed? What are the various goals of problematic and difficult artworks?
What discourses are developed through such art?

Goals: To facilitate a forum where we can really discuss performance and dance as a problematic thing, where we can share our ideas, discuss our social and political relevance, consider what it means to be ugly, catastrophic, difficult, and unwieldy

8. Music and Dance
Darío Bernal-Villegas and Janice Lancaster Larsen

The laboratory will explore attentive listening and the relationship between music / dance through improvisation and experimentation both in sound and movement. It will seek to be a space generated by collective creation. It is intended that the dancers will interact with the musicians and vice versa, not only through listening and movement, but also in relationship to space. We will explore how musicians and dancers can generate and develop clear ideas at the time of execution, producing a dialogue in which there is clarity and creative risk. The question: "can we create in the moment and make compositional decisions without getting lost in self rewarding experience?" will be a fundamental axis for this research.