Derek McCormack: Thinking and moving with atmospheric things | Friday 11 April | 7pm

About

The annual WHAT festival is a platform for invited artist curators to ask questions of dance, and through dance. This year, the festival re-imagines itself through a public residency and guest lectures. Four public talks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday will look at the thinking body through different lenses: language, writing, philosophy, geography, education and performance. Together, the talks develop a body of thought about how attention operates, how we direct ourselves and our thinking to ways of being full-blooded human. The four guest speakers of the what_now festival: Derek McCormack, Caroline Bergvall, Joris Vlieghe and Laura Cull. Thinking and moving with atmospheric things To move and think with things is to become responsive both to the qualities of those things and to their capacities to move and be moved in different ways. It is also to become responsive to the processes and relations from and within which these things emerge. I use the shape of a simple device — the balloon — as a kind of enabling constraint for thinking in movement. The presentation revolves around a series of stories of the circumstantial excursions of the balloon as it becomes and does atmospheric things in a range of contexts. Through these stories I explore what it might mean to incorporate elemental, atmospheric forces, into the speeds and directions of our thinking and moving as part of the cultivation of worldly sensibilities that are only ever partially dirigible. About Derek... Dr. Derek McCormack is associate professor of human geography at the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Duke University Press, 2013) and is currently working on a book about atmospheric things. Other talks at what_now 2014: Caroline Bergvall: 26 writing joints | Saturday 12 April | 2pm Joris Vlieghe: BEING-ENTIRELY-FLESH | Saturday 12 April | 7:30pm Laura Cull: A(n Interrupted) Lecture on Attention in 9 Parts | Sunday 13 April | 3pm Price: £6/£4 each £10/£7 for any two talks £18/£12 for all four talks Booking is highly recommended , please call 020 7091 9650 to purchase your tickets. Venue: Siobhan Davies Studios 85 St George's Road SE1 6ER For more information about the residency and the guest speakers please visit http://www.independentdance.co.uk/programmepage/activities/what-festival/