EVENT ARCHIVES

Curious

with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris

This workshop took place on Saturday 19 - Sunday 20 March 2005 in the Playroom Studio, Lancaster University

Please click here to see examples of participants' writing and film footage from the workshop.

Leslie Hill and Helen Paris are London-based artists working in performance, video and digital arts, known for their edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics, work which has been called ‘as smart as it is seductive'. Their company 'curious' was formed in 1996.

Paris and Hill led the participants through an exploration of working with and writing from different sites, including: the Site of the senses; the site of the Body; urban and suburban sites; private and public sites; and industrial and domestic sites.

The workshop explored writing for specific mediums and forms including: live performance; poetry and fiction; the Internet; video/film and sound installation. In the workshop participants used site to inspire their writing and explore how place influences text and performance. By the end of the workshop each participant created a site-specific piece of text which was presented in their chosen site. Participants also discussed contemporary site-specific performance including Curious's site-specific piece On the Scent.

I really enjoyed the workshop and thought it was well organised and well run. I am just beginning to work on a more performance based approch to my poetry so it was useful to be able to talk to women who have more of a background in performance than I have and to see how they put their work together. I appreciated the opportunity to be able to develop site specific work in a safe and constructive environment. I have never worked in that way before but I think that site specific work is something that I may try and bring into my own way of working.

GH

Leslie Hill and Helen Paris are a fantastic team; they made me understand what it is to write performatively. They compliment each other's working methods. Helen's exercise about ‘body memory' (identifying one part of my body and writing its memory) opened up a new creative connection between writing, body and memory. Leslie's structured short writing tasks that required us to ‘mix and match' our and other people's writing made me produce some surprisingly charged work. The Curious workshop weekend was a highly productive journey for both my writing and my performing skills.