Teaching

hancock & kelly employ a range of approaches in engaging with audiences and practitioners. These include presenting talks and lectures on their own work, facilitating workshops informed by their methodologies, leading creative research residencies, and mentoring programmes.

They have worked with undergraduate and postgraduate university students, emerging practitioners, established artists, and others with an interest and commitment to exploring the body in performance.

Workshops and presentations have been hosted internationally by universities, art schools, dance centres, festivals, performance venues, and art galleries.

For enquiries, availability, and bookings contact: (e) hancockandkelly@gmail.com

Viral Bodies | Workshop

7 day workshop conducted in English.

The workshop offers a radical reframing of notions of collaboration. Stepping away from a utopian vision of shared objectives and hegemonic aspiration, Viral Bodies asks to reconsider collaboration as a viral form; as a process of contamination and bodily infection.

In Lone Duets (2005-2008), Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly interrogated their own collaboration through a series of solo performances, with each performance in the series made alternately by Hancock and Kelly in response to the work of the other. Taking this model of cannibalisation as the basis for production, this workshop considers the body as a site for collaboration to take hold and proliferate. Collaboration is considered in relation to questions of endurance, duration, and concentration  based on infection and incubation periods.

This seven day workshop culminates in a public performance inspired by the process. Participants should be aware of the potentially explicit nature of the workshop, and be comfortable with their capacity to be both challenged and challenging in a respectful environment.

Participants are welcome from a variety of backgrounds – dancers, performers, visual artists, and anyone with an interest in the body and a desire to perform it at its capacity.

The workshop takes place across a range of times during the day and night.

The Body As Witness | Workshop

7 day workshop conducted in English.

In a space between binaries...
between body and mind...
between self and other...
between holding on and letting go...
I am unable to watch and unwilling to look away...
between inside and out...
between then and now...
between sucking in and breathing out...
i bare witness...
... I am slave to your rhythms

The workshop focuses on sensory engagements at the point of failure – with both our own bodies and those of others. Participants engage with a variety of internal and external stimuli and restrictions, as motivations for improvisation. Drawing on the discipline of Authentic Movement, specific attention is paid to the logging of that experience, and to the role of the body as witness – and eventual testament – replaying and remixing experiences between bodies, over time, across mediums, and languages. Collectively, we ask: How is the body, and its performance, framed by the witness and their testimony? and how do language and testimony serve to locate and orient the body?

This seven day workshop culminates in a public performance inspired by the process. Participants should be aware of the potentially explicit nature of the workshop, and be comfortable with their capacity to be both challenged and challenging in a respectful environment.

Participants are welcome from a variety of backgrounds – dancers, performers, visual artists, and anyone with an interest in the body and a desire to perform it at its capacity.

Stolen Breath | Workshop

1 day workshop conducted in English.

The workshop offers an introduction to thinking through performance as a dialogical call-and-response model. It reframes dialogue as stolen breath based on the expectation that if one subject announces it compels another to answer. That answer is based on deliberation and negotiation of the self in relation to the other. Gradually, a critical and urgent conversation starts to emerge from a series of utterances.

This one day workshop provides a devising model which can be further developed and is applicable across disciplines. Participants generate material in relation to both self and other stemming from provocations and themes. Participants should be prepared to be both challenged and challenging in a respectful environment.

Participants are welcome from a variety of backgrounds – dancers, performers, visual artists, and anyone with an interest in the body and a desire to perform it at its capacity.

Almost There | Workshop

1 day workshop conducted in English.

The workshop offers an introduction to performance accountability. It nurtures risk and mindfulness through consequential gestures that effect the bodies of self and others. It encourages performance focus through and evolving yet sustained awareness of a series of interlinked moments.

This one day workshop provides a thinking platform for performance accountability approached through the micro-gestures that rippled from one body to another and beyond. Participants experience a range of performance affectation ranging from power with responsibility, consensual risk, duty of care for the other and vulnerability. Participants should be prepared to be both challenged and challenging in a respectful environment. 

Participants are welcome from a variety of backgrounds – dancers, performers, visual artists, and anyone with an interest in the body and a desire to perform it at its capacity.

Facilitated Research Residencies

5-10 day residencies conducted in English.

Working with small groups of advanced practitioners, focusing on a common thematic, hancock & kelly developed a model for creative practice-based research.

The process was piloted in 2007 at the Drill, in Sydney (AUS), as a part of an international exchange project between Critical Path (AUS) and Dance4 (UK), focusing on notions of the body and memory. The model consisted of two discrete strands of activity.

The first involved daily one-to-one activities between hancock & kelly and the individual participants, taking place off site and directed by the participants. The second strand was studio-based and involved 5 days of group activities, during which all members of the group developed artistic responses to daily research questions posed by hancock & kelly, arising from the individually directed sessions.

The material generated during the residency is documented on video, and an edited collection made available to all participants at the conclusion of the project.