Livable Futures contributing artists, Bhumi Patel, Laura Rodriguez | LROD, and Norah Zuniga Shaw will be presenting a performative workshop at MOCO24 (Movement and Computing Conference) in the Netherlands.

This will be in person and they are also planning a future online version to invite folks in our larger international community into the work!

Livable Futures Workshop: The Unarrivable Horizon  

As the tectonic forces of xenophobia, technodeterminism, orientalism, homophobia, and transphobia collide with climate catastrophe, we are left dancing on unstable ground. This Livable Futures workshop supports exploration of questions at the heart of present conditions, questions about futures, livability, instability, and connection. Three interdisciplinary artists Bhumi B Patel, LROD, and Norah Zuniga Shaw, invoke these questions through co-facilitated, intermedia improvisational movement practices, reflection, and dialogue.

Through movement, sound, and active reflection, we ask together: What is a future? What are livable futures? How can we be in community and connection while creating these livable futures? How do we find and create resilience even as we fight the forces requiring it of us? In what ways can the physical intelligence of dancers be better mobilized to support grounded flexibility and dynamic stability during times of rapid technological and planetary change, inequity, and irreversible loss? Expanding upon the platform of the Livable Futures project, this workshop mobilizes creative solutions for survival under planetary conditions of unpredictability and crisis. Together, we create from a space of engagement with Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” and invent “tentacular practices,” to engage with “life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres” (Haraway 2016) as a means to continue to develop futurism-oriented movement practices.

We will move and make sound together in an inclusive format open to anyone.

BIOS:

Norah Zuniga Shaw is an interdisciplinary artist and director for performance and technology projects that integrate body, ecology, collaboration, and liberation and Artistic Director for Livable Futures.

LROD, is a longtime contributing artist to Livable Futures and a recognized choreographic Director, Creative, and Producer from El Paso, TX. The company LROD began 2014 continues to perform across the US, Canada, and MX. LROD received an MFA from The Ohio State University in Dance and Intermedia with a Minor in Latinx Studies. LROD received a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in the Professional Dancers Program. LROD’s designs, communal form, and post-colonial scaffolding for potential futures in art, performance, technology, and dance are sewn here. 

Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi, science-fiction movement artist and writer. She directs pateldanceworks and is a PhD candidate at Ohio State University. She has presented her choreographic work in the Bay Area, Manoa (Hawai’i), Los Angeles, New York, and Columbus (Ohio). Patel was a 2022-2023 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Bhumi’s research on queer decoloniality and improvisation intersects with her performance-making as a way of tracing the deep connections of past, present, future to build communities of nourishment and care. She is a contributing artist and scholar in our Livable Futures community since 2022.

Workshop

When: Friday May 31, 2024 | 3-4:30pm

Where: University of Utrecht