DIY: 2016 – Karen Christopher ‘Dream Audience’

THE DEADLINE FOR THIS DIY HAS NOW PASSED

A mutual response group for giving and getting feedback

Project summary

This Dream Audience is not an audience for finished work but one that looks at your unfitted, unfinished, undigested, your questionable, your half-baked, your nearly there, your lost in the underground ideas that need a bit of airing to get a handle on them. Aimed at performance makers, approaches to creative response will be invented or engineered from existing models with emphasis on blurring the creative and the critical.

This DIY group will be setting and testing ways of getting together to show unfinished work as a way of seeing it better and bringing outside eyes in without feeling the weight of mentorship at delicate phases of work; exploring what kind of feedback or response is most helpful and what structures for conversation or reflection can be generative rather than confining or conforming or dismaying in their influence on ongoing projects; finding a multiplicity of ways to deliver feedback and specific methods or approaches that work for specific kinds of work or dispositions of artists.

I will propose a set of guidelines to provide a scaffold to support those designed by the group or by specific individuals who wish to diverge from consensus. Decisions will be negotiated through collaboration and consensus but as convenor of the group I reserve final word on disputes that fail to find consensus.

Meeting 5 times for full-day sessions (with lunch provided) over a period of 5 months (late July through November), the first meeting will be devoted to defining possible approaches and setting guidelines for the showing and response sessions followed by 4 meetings spread across four months to show work. We will be looking at and discussing 4 works each session and the goal will be for each participant/group to present work at least twice.

Participants

The group might include 8 participants if all of the participants are solo artists or as many as 20 people if it includes a couple of groups. The total number of individuals depends on the shape of the parties applying to participate.

The application asks for an expression of interest, including a description of your current or recent preoccupations in no more than 300 words, a short bio, and 2 or 3 photos. While the focus will be on performance-making or other time-based work, the project is open to any experience, ability, or age level as well as differing starting points or disciplines.

Dates, times and location

Dates: 16 July, 13 August, 17 September, 22 October, 5 November (all Saturdays)
Times: full-day sessions (with lunch provided)
Location: Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
This DIY is supported by Chapter

The artist

Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer, and teacher. Her London-based company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is engaged in the dynamics of collaboration. She is devoted to paying attention as a practice of social cooperation. Her practice includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet. She was with Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. www.karenchristopher.co.uk