Performance: Friday 16th October 2015, 7pm Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University

Workshop: Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th October 2015, approx. 10am-5pm Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University

Over the past decade or so, in her solo and collaborative work in live performance and film, Jane Mason has explored ways in which the movements of bodies and objects can create ‘image worlds’ of great affective resonance and tenderness.

These dynamic architectures of memory, loss, and longing combine dance, text, song and music in patterns of images that slowly align and unfold to suggest passage ways through felt times and spaces of a rhythmed intimacy and intensity. Usually triggered by some aspect of her own lived experience, these ‘worlds’ invite a quiet attention to detail, and an active slowing down into present process.

Over the years, many of Jane’s images have lingered with me and etched themselves into my imagination – for in their exquisite precision and mystery, paradoxically they seem to invite and activate something of the life forces within our own memories and associational fields.

With its initial trigger in some boxes of photographic slides taken by her father some years ago, LIFE FORCES develops this work of mining, uncovering, transposing and inviting, and opens up new landscapes of be/longing. Developed in close collaboration with film maker Magali Charrier, writer-performer Phil Smith, visual artist Sophia Clist and dramaturg David Williams, Life Forces offers a meditation on memory’s place in the face of uncertain futures, on place and home and their resilient fragilities, on the utopian impulse to ‘build’ together and to let (it) go, on the arcing electricity of connection and the drift of dispersal, and on transformation and change as the core ground of being, the ‘life force’ that links everything and everyone.

Biographies 

JANE MASON Choreographer/ Writer  –  

Jane works as an independent choreographer and performer (Singer, Come on Sun, Desert) and for film (ANDOUT, Hard Told). She danced for Random Dance (1994-97) before freelancing for choreographers including; Charles Linehan, Wendy Houstoun, Emilyn Claid, Colin Poole, balletLorent and Deborah Hay. She choreographs in various collaborative contexts, including with Lone Twin, and with directors for theatre productions: Mr Kolpert (Royal Court), Song of Songs (Weeding Cane), Breathing Irregular (The Gate), SUSAN and DARREN, Old People, Children and Animals and Entitled for Quarantine, and most recently for Adrian Howells’ LIFE GUARD. Recent projects include: Blind Ditch’s This City’s Centre, collaborations with filmmaker Rachel Davies and writer Natalie McGrath on We’ll Meet in Moscow. She received Dance4’s 2014 Commission Collective commission to create ‘A Dance at Home’.

PHIL SMITH Performer/ Writer  – 

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and researcher. He specialises in creating performances related to walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. He is a core member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites. He is company dramaturg for TNT (Munich), the world’s leading English language theatre touring to non-anglophone countries. His most recent work includes a performance for a visually impaired audience with Siriol Joyner, Blind Ditch’s This City’s Centre and the keynote presentation for the Resonant Terrains conference at HMP The Verne. His books include On Walking (2014),Enchanted Things (2014), Counter-Tourism: The Handbook   (2012) and Mythogeography (2010) (all Triarchy Press). He is Associate Professor (Reader) at Plymouth University.

Prices and Booking

Performance of Life Forces: 
£12 Full time employed or covered by organisation or institution
£9 Freelance or Part time employed
£6 In full time education or unemployed

Email  to book tickets. Buy one get one half price when you book for this and for  performance at the same time

Life Forces Workshop with Jane Mason & Phil Smith:

Workshop fee:
£90 Full price (ft employed/workshop paid by organisation or institution)
£75 Independent Artist (pt employed and or freelance artist)
£60 Concession (in full time education and/ or unemployed)

Bookings: To book your place please download the  and send it to 

Booking for workshops closes on 30th of September and payment is due by 1 week before the workshops.

Discount available if booking for multiple Moved Series workshops!

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