Objects as Portals: a workshop with Charlotte Spencer + Shivaangee Agrawal
How can we access sensory memory, movement and language through our everyday environment? Drawing on practices from Charlotte Spencer’s recent artistic work Memory Table, Charlotte and Shivaangee co-lead this workshop using objects as access points into multi-sensory experience, memory, tactility and language through a series of invitations, exchanges and choreographic scores.
Memory Table is a delicate participatory performance work set around a table, where two performers use a collection of everyday objects to evoke a series of tactile, sensory memories. Moving beyond objects’ visual qualities, the work uses the language of sensation to bring us closer to our multi-sensory bodies.
As collaborators Charlotte and Shivaangee have distinct and shared practices in making participatory performance work and integrated audio description. Through this workshop, they are curious to work with three key questions:
1. What is enshrined in an object and how does that change over time?
2. How can language both describe and create sensory encounters with our bodies?
3. How do others’ memories transform our own experiences?
Charlotte and Shivaangee invite you to bring 3 objects with you to contribute to the day: one meaningful, one arbitrary, one found on your journey to the workshop. The studio will open for an hour before and after the workshop and you are welcome to arrive and leave at your own pace.
This workshop is designed for all those who self-define as having an artistic practice, regardless of experience, and those interested in rigorous and expansive practices connected with object, memory, sensorial language and movement.
This performance is attached to performance – Memory Table, led by Charlotte Spencer.
Artist bio
Charlotte Spencer is a choreographer, teacher and curator based in Brighton. Her work sits at the intersection between choreography, embodiment, public space, social justice and accessibility. Driven by urgent social and ecological questions, Charlotte creates intimate live encounters that invite audiences to slow down, notice small details and step into the present moment shared with others. Her innovative, deeply curious work returns audiences to their porous, sensorial bodies, to each other, to the beautiful materiality of the world. Charlotte’s collaborative practice often unfolds through long, immersive residencies— which have included 3000 km cycle rides and building camps in forests. Her powerful, political, responsive work makes an active invitation to audiences and collaborators to come together and participate in reimagining how we can live in times of complexity, precarity and polarisation.
Since 2007, Charlotte has made performance work with young people, older adults, community groups and professional artists. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, often in unusual or outdoor spaces. Partners include Sadler’s Wells, Dance Umbrella, Brighton Festival, Wellcome Collection, Siobhan Davies Studios, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Turner Contemporary and festivals in Scotland, Ireland, France and Portugal. She was a Sadler’s Wells Summer University Artist (2015–18) and received a Bonnie Bird Choreographic Development Award in 2020. Charlotte trained at London Contemporary Dance School. She lives in Brighton and has two children.
Shivaangee Agrawal is a dancer, maker and researcher with an experimental practice that orbits sound-making, collective composition and creative technology. They are constantly curious about dance as a medium through which we can stay with our multiplicities – across our physical, relational, autobiographical and political experiences.
Shivaangee works across different roles in the studio, including choreographing, rehearsal directing, facilitating and audio-describing. Underpinning these modes of working is a commitment to holding space carefully, and with accountability.
As a trained audio describer, Shivaangee offers an embodied AD practice that is motivated by the imperative to keep re-centering non-visual experiences, not just in AD, but in the way that we engage with and conceive of dance. They are passionate about the complexity of access work; it can be easy to renew existing hierarchies even within our intentions to broaden participation.
Photo: Zoe Manders