The Creative Hub, The Storey Meeting House Lane Lancaster, LA1 1TH

New Ways of Learning

3rd December 2020 by Morven Macbeth

Over to our Learning and Access Officer Laurence Young:

‘We recently completed a project working with students at the University of Salford, creating two new live graphic novels using the methods we pioneered making Airlock, our Culture in Quarantine commission. Over 6 weeks the students were led through an interdisciplinary performance process, learning how to use the TroikaTronix programme Isadora to create live digital backgrounds that centred the action of two wildly different stories; a superhero adventure romp and a detective film noir.

We’re really pleased with how the project went, and incredibly impressed with what the students have produced. Having figured out a way to still make live, innovative performance during lockdown, we hope that the project will inspire new ways of thinking about how we can collaborate whilst we’re physically apart!’

Course leader Dr.Tracy Crossley said, ‘Our students found imitating the dog’s Airlock project to be both a challenging and stimulating learning experience, through which they were introduced to a new approach to interdisciplinary performance in the form of a live action graphic novel. Sitting somewhere between theatre, cinema and digital animation, this is a project that draws on the languages and compositional techniques of all of these media and blends ‘live capture’ performance with animated visual images and effects. This innovative approach to making performance work in the pandemic, challenges students conceptions about what both theatre and screen performance can be and takes them out of their comfort zone by asking them to think about acting and performance in different ways. Along the way, they learn new performance methods and compositional techniques and skills in creative digital technology. The framework of the project is also flexible enough to enable participants to collaborate and make the work online, physically in the studio, or a blending of the two.’

November 2020

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