looks like a great workshop : ) body work can be challenging if you have a group of non-performers who don't know each other terribly well, you need to spend time making people feel comfortable & if your time is limited you need to find ways to do it quickly.

the workshops i teach are mostly computer-based, but karla ptacek & i taught one last year for nancy reilly mcvittie & her live art students at MMU where we moved into a performance space & integrated bodies & web cams into the work we'd begun on the computer. most of the participants already knew each other, & were performance students. we'd spent the morning playing with avatars, which got everyone into the mood for it, but unfortunately we didn't have enough time (it was a one-day workshop) to really explore it. it would have been good to have been able to give a whole day to the physical work.

there are a lot of performance artists working in this area - stelarc (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/), blast theory (http://www.blasttheory.co.uk), the wooster group (http://www.thewoostergroup.org), etc etc. but i'm not sure who offers workshops.

h : )

Last year at trAce's Incubation conference
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/ I ran a workshop which invited people to
use dolls, parts of computers and natural materials to make small maquettes
of themselves in relation to their machines. It was a rather mad event and
I'm not sure whether it worked or not -  see the bizarre photos at
http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/photos/incubation3/ !  (some of the
participants are on this list, although whether they will own up to playing
with leaves and circuit boards is another question!) In fact, my original
plan had been to take them through a series of physical exercises before we
made the models but when it came to it, I was too shy to ask them to do
that. Does anyone else run any kind of mixed body/technology workshop? I'd
love to try it with a leader who has more experience than I had!

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helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst               
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http://www.creative-catalyst.com
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http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm
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