Black Box Curiosities + Enchantments A Real-Time Process Laboratory Workshop

Emerging from her current research project, The Abyss System, Julia invites participants to enter, explore + co-create an abyssal world. Abyssal - relating to deep, mysterious depths; of or like an abyss: immeasurable; unfathomable In this real-time process laboratory, we will be constructing + inhabiting a black box cosmos of slow-time enchantments. Working with the fading autumn light, we will visually map and model thinking + creative process, forge coexistent choreographies + generate twilight performative beings. This is an approach that reimagines the black box (theatre, cinema, camera, mind, and eye/i) as a site of strange speculative agency, slow cognition, radical adaptation, and analogue experimentation. The abyss methodology investigates the creative process as an act of conjuring + of cultivating the conditions for wonder – into | out of the dark. The explorations over the 5-days are intended to be cumulative, and by the end, we will have co-created a unique black box abyss universe. The workshop draws on + expands Julia’s extensive experience working with the interplay of performance, pinhole photography, video projection, sculptural objects, psychological garments + hybrid personae. The week will involve: Focusing exercises that support seeing/hearing, noticing + imagining Guiding slow-time attention towards close observation + capturing of detail Creating visual maps of thinking + translating these into scores for performative choreographies Developing black box texts through real-time dictation + transcription Sometimes working through/in the dark, with eyes closed or covered, nurturing other muscles of perception + concentration Explorations in disrupting + augmenting the body boundaries, extending potentials of physical form Working with processes of folding, stitching, cutting, sticking, binding, unpicking + rearranging of materials, bodies + objects Future Ritual says: Julia Bardsley makes new worlds out of the technologies, energies and cultural detritus of the present - designing aesthetics, logics and conditions which allow new processes to emerge, with strange and unexpected results. We’re excited to dive into the abyss with her, and recommend this to anyone looking to break new ground in their practice, or deepen their relationship to process and performance.