Auslan Creative Program | Ritual
Arts Northern Rivers are working with the Northern Rivers Deaf community and multi-artform partners to deliver Auslan Creative. The project is delivering a creative development program aimed at exploring models for collaboration and practice development between artists of mixed abilities and cultures.
Arts Northern Rivers engaged Deaf contemporary dancer and choreographer Anna Seymour to deliver Ritual, Re-Route, Re-Connect, a movement-based workshop held at Lismore City Hall, the home of NORPA on Saturday the 22nd of August. Two Ritual workshops were delivered exploring participatory models of working with Deaf and hearing participants through movement and dance.
Ritual, Re-Route, Re-Connect
Ritual is innate. We gesture before we verbalise. The visual precedes the verbal.
From birth, we know how to move although at some point, our mode of being switches and the verbal/audio takes over. Movement pathways get re-routed through talking and intellectualising which can bypass our body’s capability of visual, tactile and spatial intelligences. Now we live in an audio-dominant society, overloaded with noise, over-
stimulated and over-fed.
Dance and movement has the power to re-connect us with our bodies and remembering how we used to move.
Led by Deaf dancer/choreographer Anna Seymour, this movement workshop will offer some insights behind Anna’s choreographic work including tools to connect with your physical, visual and tactile awareness in movement. Anna will also open up conversations about themes of collaboration, culture, language and communication. This workshop asks the question of what ritual and movement means to us individually and
collectively.
This workshop will be in Auslan and will be voice interpreted in English. This workshop is for Deaf and hearing people interested in dance, movement and the creative process. No dance experience necessary – this is suitable for beginners and experienced movers.
Facilitator
Anna Seymour is a Melbourne-based performing artist, dance maker and teacher. She is bi- lingual in Auslan and English, is a proud Deaf woman with a passion for her community, culture and language.
Anna collaborates widely with visual artists, photographers, filmmakers, theatre makers, musicians including her mural by Guido van Helten on the MPT building in Prahran exploring people’s relationship to architecture and public spaces. Anna will join Candoco Dance Company in London in September as a company dancer for their 2020-2022 touring season.
Image: Anna Seymour during Ritual, Re-Route, Re-Connect. Photograph by Kate Holmes.
