Jude Browning & Emmie McLuskey To write, to publish, to speak, to move

To mark the end of their residency at Creative Lab, Jude and Emmie will be holding a day of programmed events open to the public. During the afternoon the artists will host a performance/writing workshop relating to their event ‘this voice is not my own’. This will be followed by a discussion group focussing on UCL PhD candidate Freya Field Donovan’s research: A Strange American Funeral: Proletarian Dance in 1930s America. The evening will include newly devised performance work by Amelia Barratt and an intimate rap gig by Ome Sa.

The schedule for the event is as follows. Audiences are invited to attend part or all of the day, all welcome.

2pm - 5pm (ticketed): Jude Browning and Emmie McLuskey will lead a workshop exploring systems of expression and instructive language. This session considers the relationship between writing and performance and actively encourages lively participation.

Freya Field Donovan will share and open up a discussion introducing her research centred in the collaborative book project between the dancer Katherine Dunham and the film maker Maya Deren. The session seeks to raise questions about what dance is - its sites, its subjects and its uses - and how the dancing body can appear, focusing on undoing assumptions around the dancing body as capable, graceful and ‘natural’ by focusing on the material complexity of media and technology.

6.30pm - 9pm (unticketed): Presentations and Performances by Amelia Barratt, Jude Browning, Emmie McLuskey, Freya Field Donovan and Ome Sa.

For more information on these sessions please contact ailie@cca-glasgow.com. Spaces on the 2pm workshop can be booked here; tickets are not required for the evening session.

Amelia Barratt is an artist based in London who works predominantly with paper, word and image. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art and completed an MA at Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. Recent live, spoken works have been informed by a writing practice that takes the form of dated diary entries and serve as investigations into the everyday, the artwork as record and a sense of the indefinite within a prescribed context. Performances this year include readings at Edinburgh College of Art, The Royal Academy Schools, Transition Gallery, London and SET Projects, London. She is co-curator of Oral Rinse, an ongoing series of art writing and vocal performance events.

Freya Field-Donavan's research investigates how proletarian dance as a cultural form was produced by and reproduced the visual culture of labour in Depression era USA. Crucial to this investigation is the expansion of the sites of dance. Dance in the 1930s was not confined to the stage as a live performance but rather circulated through the pages of magazines like the New Theatre and the New Masses and newspapers like the New York Times and Dance Observer, in the exhibitions and film screenings of the Film and Photo League and in productions by the Theatre Union. The inextricability of dance and media throughout the 1930s challenges the perception of dances’ separateness from photography and film by thinking through dance in relation to ideas of reproduction and circulation. Uncovering this forgotten interpretive and descriptive register for dance dispels the reliance on ideas of presence and authenticity in its writing. Instead proletarian dance is framed as shifting field for action and intervention.