Tightly Framed Mucking About: Queer Joys & Divergent Desires
with Dr Daniel Oliver
Course Structure: 2-day live workshop
Course Venue: BLOC
Course Dates: 9-10 December 2024
Course Fee: £35
Join Daniel in his ongoing rude and dorky development of a ‘neurotransgressive’ approach to performance making. Daniel will provide insights into his dyspraxic-led approaches to performance making and sharing.
We will work our way through practice, performance tasks, sharings and feedback, and discussions. Our focus will be on embracing and reframing ‘dysfunctional’ neurotransgressive modes of being and doing, and exploring their potentials within experimental performance making. This will mean working with our differing relationships with monotropism and polytropism, chaos and quietness, underwhelm and overwhelm, dorky fantasy world-building and stubborn attachments to the real, the socially awkward and the class clowns…. And despite the suffix ‘neuro’ dotted throughout our work together, this will not mean neglecting the role of the body.
This course is for:
Performance makers
Those who welcome neurodivergent-led spaces and practice
“Daniel often defines his practice as neurodivergent striptease. He foregrounds a clumsy, naughty, haphazard embodiment and always aims to have bits in his shows where people don’t wear any clothes and its weird and funny and then sort of fine.”
Although this will primarily be a doing workshop our discussions together will be informed by a skepticism around what philosopher Erin Manning (2016) describes as the ‘intentionality-agency-volition’ triad that reductively defines humanness in neurotypical ideology.
About the Two Days:
The first day will be split into three sessions, each around an hour, in which we will explore a different question through practical exercises and chat. The final of these sessions on the first day will produce the beginnings a performance idea. These ideas will become the focus of the second day, which will again be split into three sessions, ending with a mini sharing.
It is, however, fine to only attend for one day.
Daniel Oliver is a performance artist, lecturer, and researcher. He makes raucous, dyspraxic-led performance worlds with mysterious and complex back stories that audiences are drawn into and take roles in. These worlds can be raucous, deceptively layered and complex, loud, unpredictable, and rude, but also kind, attentive and adaptable to audience experience and actions. His work has been platformed throughout the UK and overseas for over 20 years, including at the Barbican; Tate Modern and Tate Britain; The Yard Theatre, CAC Glasgow, Forest Fringe, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich; University of the Arts, Helsinki, and Texas A&M University. He is currently an associate artist at Cambridge Junction. He is a lecturer on the Experimental Art of Performance degree at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He has published writing on neurodiversity, audience participation, and the value of celebrating awkwardness, including a book called Awkwoods, published by the Live Art Development Agency.
Images:
1) Lead Image: Daniel Oliver, Weird Seance, Spill Festival of Performance 2016. Photo by Guido Mencari
2) Bio Image (above): Daniel Oliver, Weird Seance, Spill Festival of Performance 2016. Photo by Guido Mencari
3) Performance Detail (left): Daniel Oliver, Chiperlaterartparty, Buzzcut Festival, 2017. Photo by Julia Bauer