Laressa Dickey in conversation with Michaela Gerussi

Part of the special curated series enDurANCE, curated and guest hosted by Daniela Perazzo, and supported by the Ivor Guest Research Grant and the Race and Gender Matters Research Group at Kingston University, we discuss notions of endurance, perseverance, repetition and what they really require in art and life. Discussing their new work KARRASEKARE (the Sardinian word for Carnival) the conversation probes ideas of what collectivity can offer to duration and asks how cultural traditions can speak to our contemporary world and art.

Keywords:
Endurance, contemporary dance, dance research, perseverance, tradition, carnival

As of publication in September 2023, Igor x Moreno are preparing for new tour dates in 2023/24 across the UK and Europe. All information can be found here:
http://igorandmoreno.com/calendar/

Igor x Moreno is the name under which the works created by choreographers Igor Urzelai and Moreno Solinas – in collaboration with an extended group of artists – are presented. Igor x Moreno’s works stem from a fascination for people and what makes us such special animals. They use choreography and mostly non-verbal languages to create experiences which can surprise, energise and unsettle. Their works – highly constructed whilst deeply concerned with liveness – visit and escape different genres and styles.Igor x Moreno’s creative processes favour questions over answers, action over narration, communication over expression, alterity over diversity, patience over productivity. They don’t see entertainment as their duty, but as a useful communication tool. They work with rigour and playfulness. They value pointlessness. The team – based across Europe – gathers in Sardinia and London, from where Igor x Moreno’s works have toured extensively in Europe and also in North and South America, Africa and Asia. Awards and recognitions include the Rudolf Laban Award and National Dance Awards and Total Theatre Awards nominations; their works have been selected for Aerowaves (2011, 2013 and 2015), NID Platform, British Council Showcase and British Dance Edition. Moreno Solinas and Igor Urzelai are affiliate artists of The Place (London), co-directors of Sardinian production company S’ALA (www.s-ala.com) and members of the Cultural Advisory Board of British Council Italy.

Daniela Perazzo is a dance and performance scholar with a specialist interest in the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in interdisciplinary movement practices and experimental dramaturgical processes. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. She received a PhD in Dance Studies from the University of Surrey, funded by a university scholarship (2004-2007). Her first monograph, Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019 in the "New World Choreographies" series. Other recent publications include articles in Dance Research Journal, Performance Philosophy, Performance Research, Choreographic Practices and Contemporary Theatre Review.

Introduced by Michaela Gerussi, this episode follows a conversation between Daniela Perazzo and invited guest Lenio Kaklea. It is one episode in a three-part series, enDurANCE, co-curated with Daniela. The series has been produced with the support of an Ivor Guest Research Grant awarded by the Society of Dance Research and the Race/Gender Matter research group of Kingston School of Art.

works by Lenio discussed in the conversation:

Practical encyclopedia - http://www.abd-contents.com/choreography/encyclopedie_pratique.php
detours - http://www.abd-contents.com/choreography/detours.php
balade - http://www.abd-contents.com/choreography/ballad.php
Αγρίμι (Fauve) - http://www.abd-contents.com/choreography/fauve.php

Αγρίμι (Fauve) will be presented in London at Serpentine in early winter 2024


Lenio mentions a quote on 'the institution' from American artist Andrea Fraser


Bios:

Lenio Kaklea is a dancer, choreographer, director and writer who was born in Athens and is based in Paris. She studied at the national conservatory of contemporary dance in Athens where she trained in classical ballet and American modern techniques. In 2005 she was awared a scholarship and moved to France. Lenio's artistic practice uses a wide range of media including choreography, text and video, and is influenced by feminisim and post-colonial critique. In her work she explores the production of subjectivity through the organized transmission of movements and reveals the intimite spaces in which we construct our identity. In 2009 Lenio founded abd with Lou Forster. The company develops choreographic and curatorial projects that explore the intersections of dance, research and critical theory.

Daniela Perazzo is a dance and performance scholar with a specialist interest in the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in interdisciplinary movement practices and experimental dramaturgical processes. She joined Kingston University London in 2014, having previously taught at the University of Surrey. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. Her first monograph, Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.

Anne Bourne

With experience in international intermedia performance and recording, composer/artist Anne Bourne (based in Tkaronto) creates emergent streams of cello, piano and field recordings. Anne facilitates environmental listening through the text scores and listening practice of Pauline Oliveros and walking. A Chalmers Fellow, Anne explores equanimity, microtonal sound, listening and the wave patterns of water.
I met Anne during the workshop Creative Composition at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, and had the opportunity of collaborating with her at the Venice Biennale for the sound installation Cassini’s Dream created by the artist China Blue. What stroked me from the moment I start to be with Anne in the same room, creating (and also not, just chatting and giggling) is her presence and presence to the sound, the one already present and the one created, as she composes the aliveness of the present moment, with the environment and I have been a witness of how this fine attunement changes not just the whole quality of the room, but also the listener.

‘What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener..’
Pauline Oliveros

credits for audio
elements of Nearshore: a one hour sound installation under the Gardiner Expressway
composer: anne bourne

Some of the topics we have covered
Pauline Olivieros / Deep Listening
Climate: Sea level rise
Wave patterns, shorelines, singing practices
Chant traditions: Sardinia, throat singing and harmonic chants in France
Listening walks
Ocean Space, TB21 Academy
Climate refugees, frontline issues
Listening according to perspectives
Territorial Agency and ocean literacy through Ocean Space

References we have talked about:

Hildegard Westerkamp
https://hildegardwesterkamp.ca/

Tb21Academy

https://www.ocean-space.org/about/tba21-academy



China Blue
http://chinablueart.com/

Cassini’s Dream:
https://vimeo.com/349192449?login=true

Karen Power

https://karenpower.ie/listening-antartica.html

Library of Water

https://www.west.is/en/service/library-of-water

Astrida Neimanis
Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology

Quantum Listening
Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Laurie Anderson, Aura Satz

Today, Laura Colomban from the DanceOutsideDance team has the pleasure to introduce Daniela Perazzo, Senior Lecturer in Dance at Kingston University, who will lead the conversation with Alessandro Sciarroni. This episode is part of a three-part series, enDurANCE, co-curated with Daniela, kindly supported by an Ivor Guest Research Grant awarded by the Society of Dance Research and also by the Race/Gender Matter research group of Kingston School of Art.

Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian dance and performance artist whose work goes beyond traditional definitions of genre. His creations are presented in the context of contemporary dance and theatre festivals, museums and art galleries, as well as in unconventional spaces. They are created through the involvement of collaborators from a range of disciplines. Among his numerous awards, in 2019 Sciarroni was awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for his dance career. Through the repetition of practice to the limit of the performers’ physical endurance, his works aim to expose the obsessions, fears and fragility of the act of performance. His pieces have been presented all over Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia.

Some of the topics we have covered
Endurance
Repetition
Time
Audience expectations
Audience participation
Lost dances
Polka chinata

Italy
Permission
Contemporary performance art
Fom theatre to dance
Performative space
Circulartime

References we have talked about:

Save the last dance for me
https://www.alessandrosciarroni.it/work/save-the-last-dance-for-me/?lang=en

Dream
https://www.alessandrosciarroni.it/work/dream/?lang=en

Folk-s will you still love me tomorrow?
https://www.alessandrosciarroni.it/work/folk-s/?lang=en

Chroma_don't be frightened of turning the page
https://www.alessandrosciarroni.it/work/chroma/?lang=en

Bio guest curator:

Daniela Perazzo is a dance and performance scholar with a specialist interest in the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in interdisciplinary movement practices and experimental dramaturgical processes. She joined Kingston University London in 2014, having previously taught at the University of Surrey. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. Her first monograph, Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.

This is the second episode in a two episode mini-series on the theme of Re-enchanting British dance, guest-curated by Daniela Perazzo and supported by Kingston University. These two episodes are three-way conversations between an invited artist, a member of the podcast team, and Daniela Perazzo.

This joint conversation between Michaela Gerussi, Daniela Perazzo and invited guest J Neve (Neve) Harrington takes Neve's recent project Satelliser (and accompanying digital publication satellising) as a starting point to discuss her work through a range of topics, concerns and approaches.

Below is a short text on Satelliser to help situate the listener:
“Satelliser: a dance for the gallery is a durational performance work for an intergenerational group of women. These dancers subtly alter their spatial configurations in response to the visitors’ movements, playing with the relationship between performance, visitor, and space...
Accompanying the live work is a digital publication and podcast satellising.com. which holds together contexts around Satelliser: a dance for the gallery.”
(https://jnharrington.com/satelliser-a-dance-for-the-gallery)

Some of the topics that come up throughout the conversation include:
containers
labour
parts
transparency
dance training
unison
difference
relationships
revealing difference
visibility, the primacy of vision
partial narratives/perspectives/multiple subjectivities
playfulness
materiality
the nervous system
touch

References:
Some of Neve's earlier projects which are mentioned in this episode include Screensaver Series (https://jnharrington.com/screensaver-series) and The Human Clock (https://jnharrington.com/the-human-clock-)

Neve mentions a previous episode of Dance Outside Dance with artist Florence Peake. That episode cane be found here: https://www.spreaker.com/user/danceoutsidedance/florence-peak-mixdown

Michaela quotes from a text on satellising.com which references Ann Cvetkovich. That text is Satelliser as Crafting by Else Tunemyr
https://www.satellising.com/satellising-publication/satelliser-as-crafting

Michaela reads a quote on craft by anthropologist Stephanie Bunn from her text The importance of Materials

Bios:

Michaela Gerussi is a Canadian dance artist based in London, UK. Michaela’s dance practice is nourished by her inquiry into the nervous system, interoception and attunement, in relation to her studies in Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy. Her choreographic work considers shifting relationships between people, places and materials, layering subtle perceptual detail with a functional, dynamic approach to movement.

J Neve Harrington (London, UK) is an artist whose work includes writing, dance & choreography, drawing, video, installation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neuroqueer experiences of information processing and attention.

Daniela Perazzo is a dance and performance scholar with a specialist interest in the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in interdisciplinary movement practices and experimental dramaturgical processes. She joined Kingston University London in 2014, having previously taught at the University of Surrey. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. Her first monograph, Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.

The three-way conversation begins with introductions from guest curator Daniela Perazzo, then delves into the notion of intimacy and touch in life and in performance, discussing Charlotte’s new work Written in the Body, and moving into how practices of wellness and support can exist within artistic work. Finally, we discuss the role of language in Charlotte’s work.

This is the first episode in a two part mini-series on the theme of 'Re-enchanting British dance,' guest-curated by Daniela Perazzo and supported by Kingston University. Both episodes are three-way conversations between an invited artist, a member of the podcast team, and Daniela Perazzo.

Bios:
Charlotte Spencer is a choreographer, teacher, curator, mentor and performer. She initiates all projects for Charlotte Spencer Projects, often working across art forms and in outdoor environmental contexts. Charlotte was recipient of a Bonnie Bird Choreographic Development Award in 2020. She has received commissions from The Place, Wellcome Collection, Greenwich Dance, Trinity Laban, Salisbury International Art Festival, South East Dance, Jerwood Galleries, Turner Contemporary, Siobhan Davies Dance and Brighton & Hove Libraries. Charlotte was a Sadler’s Wells Summer University Artist 2015-18 led by Jonathan Burrows and Eva Martinez, and Artist Activator at Greenwich Dance 2014-17. She has worked closely with Siobhan Davies Dance since 2010 on a variety of projects, notably leading Next Choreography 2014-16 - their choreography programme for Young People. Charlotte was a priority artist for Dance Dialogues 2 2012-14 and Tour d’Europe des Choreographes 2010/2011. Charlotte graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 2003 with a 1st Class BA (Hons). She is also in the midst of building a house in Brighton and hanging out with her young child.

Petra Söör (collaborator, Written in the Body) is a dancer, maker and facilitator, working in a range of contexts including with Fevered Sleep, Charlotte Spencer Projects, Simone Kenyon, Robert Clark, Robin Dingemans, Carrie Cracknell and the National Theatre. Alongside solo work her own practice often proposes collaborative processes within a diversity of environments, projects include Sleeping a Walking Mountain and Undanced Dances, currently evolving interests in person-centred approaches to movement, tactile pedagogy and different modalities of touch to support health and wellbeing.

Louise Tanoto (collaborator, Written in the Body) is a dance-artist based between Belgium and the UK. She trained at Laban and was a member of Transitions 2007. Louise is currently touring with Oona Doherty and Daniel Linehan as well as Charlotte Spencer Projects. Her performance credits within the UK include; Gecko, J Neve Harrington, Requardt & Rosenberg, Tilted Productions, Lost Dog, Damien Jalet and Hussein Chalayan. In Europe she has performed for Kabinet K, Eszter Salamon, Thierry de Mey, Ugo Dehaes, T.R.A.S.H (Netherlands) and was a member of Fabulous Beast. Louise is also a mother.

Julia Pond is a choreographer, researcher and teacher. An expert in Isadora Duncan technique and repertory, her contemporary research interests and performance are at the intersection of dance and politics. Her fictional company and performance project, BRED, explores notions of value and productivity. Julia is also a TECHNE-funded PhD student at Kingston University, for her project exploring re-articulations of 'value' towards sustainability through dance and movement knowledges.

Daniela Perazzo is a dance and performance scholar with a specialist interest in the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in interdisciplinary movement practices and experimental dramaturgical processes. She joined Kingston University London in 2014, having previously taught at the University of Surrey. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. Her first monograph, Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.


Read more and links:

https://www.charlottespencerprojects.org/

Full creative team credits for Written in the Body
Concept & Direction: Charlotte Spencer
Performance: Petra Söör and Louise Tanoto
Sound: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Dramaturgy: Orrow Amy Bell
Design: Bethany Wells
Costume: Shanti Freed
Lighting: Marty Langthorne
Producing support: Pip Sayers & Lou Rogers
Photography & Film: Rosie Powell
Audio Description: Shivaangee Agrawal
BSL: Katie Fenwick


The 'making' of movement and words : a po(i)etic reading of Charlotte Spencer's Walking Stories (Article by Daniela Perazzo)
https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/37237/

Im/possible choreographies : diffractive processes and ethical entanglements in current British dance practices. Dance Research Journal, 51(3), pp. 66-83. ISSN (print) 0149-7677 (Article by Daniela Perazzo)
https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/43913/

Robert Kocik's new course called “Prosody and the preciousness of life” holds the intention to call everyone together - a problematic endeavour that he argues involves spiritual practice.

Robert talked about the power of intonation and the medicine inside of it, the use of rhythm and tone, and the composition of poetry, pitch, intensity, "strofas", stanza, and junctions, which make the dynamic art of prosody. We talked about the cause and effect, the power of creativity and prosody to prevent, levitate, and contravene history, and forecasting effects that haven’t happened yet. Paraphrasing Denise Ferreira Silva in Toward a Black Feminist Poethic calls, reality is "marked by virtuality," held by the capacity to contravene the determinacy of efficient causation”.

 Hence the possibility to use tone, pitch, pause, rhythm, and gesture to create beneficial action in the world, with and for others through prosody, the white magic that holds the potential to counterbalance the “efficiency algorithm” that is suffocating the world, counteracting with the inefficacy of the art forms.

 “Magic has been perceived as a threat because it is based on organic interconnectedness, the aliveness of all things, the experience of cosmos as part of nature, the indivisibility of "man" and nature, and the doctrine of macro-and microcosmic homology, the conspiracy of all things”. 
(Kocik R., Tantra 2: prosody and cause and effect, https://www.robertkocik.com/_files/ugd/c5c021_ed0c23302802401382ea6c8a696cbc78.pdf)


The last question arises… Robert, what do we need to hear now?

We should be hearing… hearing. 

Hearing the unstruck sound, the sound that nothing causes, that gave birth to the cosmos.

Read more (links):
https://www.robertkocik.com/course-resource-page

Toward a Black Feminist Poetic, Denise Ferreira da Silva
 Dr. Nida Chenagtsang's “The Science of Interdependent Connection Mantra Healing”


Bios:
Robert Kocik is a poet, prosodist, trans-disciplinary essayist, teacher, architect and shared-prosperity activist. In 2006, he started to work collaboratively with choreographer Daria Faïn, Kocik initiated a new field of research called the Prosodic Body, an experiential artscience that collectively explores prosody: the tone, tempo, intensity and total body language of speech. In 2008 he cofounded The Commons Choir, a multi-lingual/racial/generational performing group that draws on the findings of the prosody research and presents socially charged operatic and educational events.

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Laura Colomban speaks with the disruptive technologist John Collins, founder of Innovation Foundry, a company which support business and individuals to identify new technology trends and create opportunities for collaborative innovation.
John has a fast and exceptional intelligence, he is PhD in Nuclear Physics and microelectronics besides having a passion for dance performances, theatre and cultural events, where you would probably meet him when he is not working.

Today I let you enter right in the mist of our conversation, which started talking about vibrating materials, sound waves and vibrating bodies.

We talked about bodies as mass of photons, vibrations of sound and light are absorbed into the environment, they transform but do not disappear.
We are all connected with some wave form and are connected to environments and animals like a huge microchip and doing less as human beings is necessary now. We need to take into consideration the feedback from the planet to increase the design of how we operate, being more constructive about how we use resources on the earth, to balance the process of taking and giving back to earth.

Then the question is: how can we interfere constructively in the environment?
I was struck by his sentence: 'data is the new plastic'.
The amount of energy involved in shooting and editing a IG picture is equal as the energy involved in creating a plastic bottle.
We started to imagine a software that could recycle data back to electricity, to balance the production of data everyone is responsible for. We talked about Cybernomics (cryptocurrencies and how much energy is involved in exchanging and creating them), remote working and the use of resources used during the lockdown period. Electricity and power utilised to be in a Zoom calls are overstimulating the system, the amount of resources we are utilising is unbalanced compared to the resources we return to the earth.

Lockdown and the distancing has created a sort of geometrical order in the world, less people spread apart, ordered in space like a crystal lattice: the geometry of it, goes towards order, low energy state can be seen as a new hyper normal.

If we go on this way, by 2050 half of the energy of the world will be used on streaming if we go at the current rate.


What are the ethical considerations of streamed events and compulsive usage of data?

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To support the podcast and become a supporter of danceoutsidedance you can submit at:

https://www.patreon.com/danceoutsidedance


Bios:
Until recently John was Operations & Commercial Director of the UK National Centre for commercialising Engineering Biology - SynbiCITE - at Imperial College London. SynbiCITE is growing industry based on using the engineering of biology to ‘do useful things & make useful stuff to heal us, feed us, fuel us & most imperatively, sustain us’.
John helps turn ‘upstarts into start-ups and start-ups to become grown ups’ through business incubation & acceleration programmes, the one John is most proud to have ensured funding for Synthetic Biology – the technology that will grow a new industry solving global challenges. He mentors and advises a considerable number of businesses and company founders across a range of technologies and business areas, and is a part of the Royal Academy of Engineering LIF Mentoring Scheme.
Throughout his careers John has run his own ‘Disruptive Technologies and Innovations Management’ consultancy – Innovation Foundry Ltd. – and continues to work with a diverse spread of technologies, services and creative industry. He is an advisor to the government’s Digital Catapult, advising on ethics and AI, Blockchain (DLT) and tech in general. John also teaches the IP for Entrepreneurs module at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS) and supervises a number of students there.
He’s an active advisor on UK government Programme Expert Groups covering the National Measurement Service for digital, chemical, biological, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and environmental metrology & standards, shaping the future impact of measurement science on these thematic areas, in particular with advancing solutions to reduce GHG emissions.
John is also Chair of the Real Time Club – the world’s oldest technology networking club, running 54 years – working with leading philosophers, scientists & technologists promoting ‘technology for all, technology for good’ and community building, the RTC network is now more than 6300 members and growing daily!

In this conversation recorded in May 2020, Laura Colomban and Florence Peake talk about assumptions in a white-based somatic world, and through the topic of vibrating materials, move on to talk about the idea of penetration and infection of bodies as a place of desire.

We continued exploring assumptions around audience participation, intentions as felt vibratory matter in the room, telepathy as technology, sexuality and flesh, channelling concerns as a way to process with the audience in a performative platform.

I met her during the MFA Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and she touched me deeply as a person and artist, I hope you will enjoy our talk.

Bios:
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995.
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach that is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate.
Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas. Peake’s work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world.

Read more (links):

http://www.florencepeake.com

Donna Haraway:
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press Books. https://www.dawsonera.com:443/abstract/9780822373780

Bell Hooks:
Hooks B. ( 2000). All about love: new visions. New York.

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Erik Davis and Julia Pond talk about psychedelic dance and the way altered states of mind and movement interact. Topics range from bone-dancing at Grateful Dead shows ("The bands were incidental to the dance"), the way movement resonates through time and generations, and the salvage rhythms of late capitalism (with thanks to Anna Tsing for the phrase).

Bios:
Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and most recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books, including Suzanne Treister’s HFT: The Gardener(Black Dog), Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave), Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico, 2005), Rave Ascension (Routledge, 2003), and Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle, 2002). In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals, including Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired and the Village Voice.
A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries, as well as in Craig Baldwin’s underground film Specters of the Spectrum. He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera. He hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.


Julia Pond is a dance artist, teacher and researcher interested in how embodied practices and dance interact with social and political themes. Julia has worked primarily in the UK, US and Italy, and is currently completing an MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban / Independent Dance, as well as podcasting, parenting, and teaching.

Read More:
Erik Davis: https://techgnosis.com/
Burning Shore Substack Newsletter: https://www.burningshore.com/
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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