Sleep Activism explores sleep and sleeplessness as sites of unlearning.

Hello and welcome. Please be very comfortable.

Sleep Activism is a space-time, collectively made, for activities, processes, ideas and reckoning that start and end in the body. Together we make a soft, tender space for dance-artists and other practitioners to luxuriate in processes of rest and resistance.

Over a 12-hour cycle we’ll be exploring notions of sleep/lessness as a corporeal practice; as sites of unlearning and resistance. Considering relations between standing and falling, activity and passivity, doing and undoing, Sleep Activism declares itself first and foremost a choreographic practice in which our bodies become sites of encounter. Here, we unravel the myth that activism and choreography must perform a certain kind of doing.

The Lab will be open to the public at 5.30-7pm for a wider sharing of Sleep Activism with a presentation by Amaara and Anabelle. This will be video recorded, and is free to attend.

Presented by Lucy Guerin Inc for FRAME: A biennial of dance.

When
Saturday 18 March 2023
9am – 9pm
Please note: attendance for the entire duration of the workshop (9am-9pm) is required in order to participate.

The Lab will be open to the public at 5.30-7pm for a wider sharing of Sleep Activism.

Cost
$60 + BF

Eligibility
This workshop is suitable for artists of any discipline who are interested in collective, durational, emergent and generative choreographic practices. You don’t need to be a professional dancer to engage in this lab but you do need to be open and willing to move.

What to bring
Wear clothes you feel good moving in; and bring a blanket and a cushion and some things to write with.

What about food?
Lunch, dinner and yummy snacks will be provided.
Lunch and dinner provided by Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Catering.

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Access
A range of facilities support people with a wide range of access needs to visit WXYZ Studios. For more information, please visit our website.

Sleep Activism is Wheelchair Accessible  

Sleep Activism is a Relaxed Performance  

The public presentation at 5.30-7pm has a Visual Rating 50% (includes dialogue and background music or sounds) so Deaf and hard of hearing audiences can have some engagement with the event.

Quiet Spaces Available  

If you have any questions about access please email Producer Estelle Conley estelle@lucyguerininc.com. You can supply your mobile number via email if you would prefer to discuss or text via phone.

Schedule

9.00am: Welcome tea
9.30am: Workshop #1: Resting in-movement
12.30pm: Beautiful lunch and time to digest
2.00pm: Workshop #2: Sites of unlearning
4.00pm: Walk, read, write or nap in your own time
5.30pm: Presentations by Amaara Raheem & Anabelle Lacroix + Q&A / Open to the public
7.00pm: Delightful dinner
8.00pm: Workshop #3: The night as time of freedom, protest or philosophical awakening
9.00pm: Workshop ends

Preparation material

In-preparation for Sleep Activism, we invite you to engage with one or more of these offerings:

To listen

A Life Worthy of Our Breath, Krista Tippet & Ocean Vuong (conversation)
I am asleep in your night yet to come, Geoff Robinson (soundwork)
Submerged, Amaara Raheem (sonic score)
Falling, Meredith Monk (song)

To read

Writing In The Expanded Field online collection facilitated and edited by Lucinda Strahan, Non-Fiction Lab in partnership with ACCA.

Doubt Writing / Writing Doubt

To do

A movement score by Stephanie Skura

Do five 30-second dances. Enter at the beginning of each dance; exit at the end of each dance.

About the artists

Amaara Raheem, Creator/Facilitator
Amaara Raheem is a dance-artist, researcher and writer. In 2021 she co-curated an online symposium with Dance Art Foundation, ‘Organising for Change’ that led to an ongoing interest in how dance organises spaces of activism. Amaara lives between Naarm/Melbourne and rural Victoria where she co-hosts a residential arts hub for reparative practices with artist Mick Douglas. Amaara holds a PhD from the School of Architecture and Urban Design (RMIT University); is a part-time Lecturer at The Victorian College of the Arts (Dance); sits on the Artistic Directorate for Next Wave; and is the first Feminist-Thinker-In-Residence with APHIDS (2023).

Anabelle Lacroix, Collaborator
Anabelle Lacroix is a French-Australian curator. Working with exhibitions, public programming, and radio, she is interested in the expanded fields of curating and writing, involving performance, sound, speech and publishing. As part of a PhD at the University of New South Wales, she is developing time-bound curatorial methods for sleepless bodies, and for rhythming otherwise. In 2021, she curated Freedom of Sleep at Fondation Fiminco in Paris. She is a current editor of Flaneur Magazine and a lecturer at The New School Paris. In Melbourne, she worked with Liquid Architecture and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art among others.

Caitlin Dear, Collaborator
Caitlin Dear is a choreographer who works interdisciplinarily across dance, live art, academia and practice-based research. They create sensorially and intellectually engaging experiences, whether it be an action in a gallery, performance in a theatre or outdoor engagement in a public setting. Their projects prioritise audience/community participation by incorporating immersive and interactive elements. These bring people into somatic engagements with Caitlin’s conceptual inquiries; dissolving boundaries between artist, audience, artwork and everyday life. Caitlin’s work (queer, crip and theoretically rich in nature) has been described to (paradoxically) engender clinical wonder and focused multiplicity, encouraging audiences to ponder philosophical problems from an embodied perspective with a scientific sensibility.

Image credit: Amaara Raheem
Image description: A person resting on rocks, with a brimmed hat covering their face. The sky is vivid blue.