From Tania El Khoury and Abigail Conway's DIY 12 'FAF: Female Armed Forces'

We were pleased to support LADA's 2018 DIY North America program, featuring UK artists Dickie Beau and Tania El Khoury. 

Created by the UK-based Live Art Development Agency (LADA), the DIY program was an opportunity for artists working in Live Art to conceive and run professional development projects for other artists. The 2018 North America program included British artists Dickie Beau and Tania El Khoury, who lead two workshops each at the Chocolate Factory Theater (New York, NY) and Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX). These workshops followed other successful workshops led by Dickie Beau and Selina Thompson in Canada in February 2018. 

Workshops

The workshops listed below were open for artists, performers, dancers, and other participants who are interested in making performance work in a collaborative environment exploring challenging content. All of the workshops were free of charge. 

Tania El Khoury - State Violence: A Choreography

  • Chocolate Factory Theater, NY: October 29-31, 2018
  • Fusebox Festival, TX: November 13-15, 2018

Incidents of state violence and police brutality in the public space get engrained in our collective memory through repeated replay of video documentation and the retelling of the scene. Official authorities often deny the existence of state violence and justify such incidents as accidents rather than deliberate performances of oppression. These workshops propose to break down state violence as a choreographic score. By looking closely at certain incidents of state violence in a city, we will research, revise, annotate, and perform scores of state violence. The movement and embodied perception exercises are more a choreography of resistance to that said violence. The workshops contain collective discussions, group and individual creations, writing, and movement exercises. This DIY will be led by artist Tania El Khoury with artist luciana achugar in New York, and artist China Smith in Austin.

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Dickie Beau - Broken Footnotes on Camp

  • Chocolate Factory Theater, NY: November 3-4, 2018

Two theatre queens, Dickie Beau and Jack Ferver, are offering a this for independent performance makers interested in exploring the interface between their authentic inner beings and their appearances.

The selected group will explore the embodiment of archetypes using the work of playwright Tennessee Williams, with a particular focus on ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. Subjects are likely to include: ways of feeling; camp vs neo-camp; catharsis; connectedness; comedy; and cruelty. A good deal of the workshop may also be left to that other C: chance.

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Dickie Beau - Blindr

  • Fusebox Festival, TX: November 10-11, 2018

Dickie Beau and Paul Soileau are seeking artists who identify as gay men for blind dates. Originally conceived in collaboration with Toronto artists 2boys.tv, Blindr draws upon themes which relate to Dickie's seminal work 'Lost in Trans', as well as raising specific questions around gay male subjectivity, visibility, invisibility, and other ways of looking at the gaze. The workshop is informed by the artists' thinking around liminal histories; queer histories; sites of transgression; dark rooms; the performative and transformative power of shame; serenades; safe spaces and dangerous spaces; and the position of the artist as being “in the dark” during a creative process; also, the implications of solitude, of collaboration, and approaches to intimacy. 

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External links