Dance, Architecture and Engineering Book Launch
Join us to celebrate the launch of Theatrum Mundi fellow Adesola Akinleye’s latest book Dance, Architecture and Engineering (Dance in Dialogue).
This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. Adesola engages with dance’s offer of perspectives on being in place: how the ‘ordinary person’ is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place – in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today’s era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. The author concludes in response-conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.
Adesola Akinleye is a research fellow working with Theatrum Mundi since 2019. In the first phase of her research, Adesola has been looking at the emerging vocabulary that connects ideas within dance-making in choreography and city-making.
LIVE PROGRAMME
Introduction by Theatrum Mundi director and book contributor John Bingham-Hall, and author Adesola Akinleye.
Theatrum Mundi associate director, curator, commissioner and artist, Marta Michalowska, will give readings from the book, and DancingStrong Movement Lab will also present excerpts from Concrete-Water-Flesh live, through an online dance performance drawing on choreographic ideas revealed by the process of making the book itself.
The evening will end with a Q&A from the public.
The event is free to attend. We encourage you to get yourself a copy of the book here.
