"A carnival spirit pervades all people; in the heart of every crowd is a festival longing to be born." (Victor Hugo)

"Carnival is not representation; it is the reality of a community coming into presence, a theatre without spectators." (Edouard Glissant)

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This workshop with visual/performance artist and writer Alys Longley is designed to cross boundaries between art forms, working with the body in space and time to develop approaches to installation, text and site specific composition.

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With the simple and accessible material of cardboard, we will explore strategies for performance making that test out practices for sculpture and installation, writing and moving. Cardboard is a material that can be found in different cultures, communities and spaces, all over the world. Alys has been working with Chilean dance artist Macarena Campbell-Parra on a series of performances where international artists develop transnational practices following simple instructions to create work with cardboard. This has brought geographically dispersed artists together, and developed a series of extraordinary performances in Santiago Chile, Auckland NZ, and Stockholm, Sweden.  

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In this workshop we’ll explore some of these tasks, and participants will have the choice to develop their work as text, performance, sound, or choreographic composition. It’s an approach to creativity that allows us to work alongside each other, and be inspired by each other to develop different kinds of artistic expression, working with a shared focus.

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Running from 10:30am-1pm, this is open to artists, dancers, writers, performance makers, and composers aged 16 and above -  this workshop welcomes anyone keen to expand their creativity and explore something new.

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Alys Longley (PhD) is a Professor of Creative Arts and an interdisciplinary artist with twenty years’ experience inartistic research practice. She has worked closely with Jeffrey Holdaway, Francisco González Castro, Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira, and Macarena Campbell-Parra over nine years to develop new international performance opportunities in Latin America, Europe, and the USA. Alys is highly experienced in leading interdisciplinary teams, such as in Fluid City, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together, which involved large teams and ambitious artistic goals.

An interdisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher, Alys Longley’s work spans live performance, artist books, installation, film, education curriculum, poetry, performance writing, and lecture-demonstration. Over the last decade, she has explored mistranslation studies - working across languages and disciplines to examine the spill of ideas beyond conventional systems of meaning - through a series of international artistic research projects in Berlin (Germany), Santiago (Chile), Coimbra (Portugal), New York City and Chicago (USA), Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland and Pōneke/Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand), Vienna (Austria), and Stockholm (Sweden). Alys is a Professor in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Auckland.