This work explores Place-making from the perspective of my choreographic dance practice in conversation with architectural and engineering practices. It continues my interest in narrating/understanding Place through starting with somatic experiences. While also asking how agency can be equitable across the entities that come together in the making of that Place.
Theatrum Mundi Research Fellowship – Phase One (2019 -20)
Choreographing the City: at/as the city limits
Phase One took a starting point from the paper ‘Choreographing the City: Can dance practice inform the engineering of sustainable urban environments?’ (Bingham-Hall & Cosgrave, 2019). Activity and events that the book draws on, involved site visits to architectural and engineering organizations working with city-scale projects, two week-long residency events where I worked with dancers, musicians, engineers and architects to explore and exchange movement ideas, along with seven public events of performances, sharing workshops, and dance/talks. Link to Theatrum Mundi page
This phase informed the book: Dance, Architecture and Engineering (Dance in Dialogue) Bloomsbury Publishers 2021
Related event at Whitechapel Gallery (June 2019): Learning environments: a discussion Alternative, democratic and self-led education models, and the architectural responses associated with them, are the subject of this talk and panel discussion led by architects and academics Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler from Kingston School of Art. Guest speakers include Dr Catherine Burke, Reader in History of Education and Childhood, University of Cambridge, artist Nils Norman, Dr. Adesola Akinleye, dancer and PhD artist-scholar, and Sol Perez Martinez, PhD researcher at UCL, who will each bring their research and practices around alternative pedagogies and the built environment into the conversation.
Theatrum Mundi Research Fellowship – Phase One (2020-21)
Navigations
2020 COVID lock down explorations:
Choreographing the City at MIT (2020 – 22)
Dr. Adesola Akinleye’s residency at MIT, that is hosted by Professor Gediminas Urbonas and ACT course 4.314/4.315 and supported by CAST.
Aim: to explore how research and creative collaboration between choreographic and spatial practices can help create new techniques, lexicons, and ways of consulting with community around urban design.
The project looks at how choreography (seeing movement as a ‘three-dimensional language’) can contribute to larger discussions across subject areas that engage with movement in space and the Place making that the experience of dance creates. At MIT Akinleye will look at Urban design through the lens of capturing the corporeal and bodily experience of Place as a form of data alongside traditional GIS data. The project explores how the bodily experience and language of dance can add to engineering and architectural lexicons of Place as well as give methods of communication for individuals living in urban communities. Is there a possibility of an emotional GIS / a GIS of cultural and individual memories? Can we see a design as an organic, collaborative entity of people’s experience? What tools do urban designers and engineers have to understand how these spaces would work as movement systems? What tools do communities have to describe the experience of Being in the Places they live? The project will investigate approaching Urban design through seeing choreographic practice as a language for the somatic experience of being in a Place, the research will offer new ways to conceive of the measure of ‘space’.
Emerging lexicon, these inform next steps of the inquiry: power (to and over), preciseness, improvisation/response/spontaneity, connection/disconnection, growth, resistance, boundary, agency, four-dimensional space, score. About Residency MIT and Research Affiliate profile ACT, MIT .
MIT Clips from the Classroom