DEEDS & GESTURES, workshop directed by Sally Jane Norman
Public presentation of workshop activities, July 29^th

Sally Jane Norman
Performing arts theorist and practitioner, author of texts dealing with the body, theatre, and technology, including a doctorat d’état (Université de Paris III) and several articles published by the Laboratoire de recherches sur les arts du spectacle (CNRS). In 1993, she organised the Louvre international symposium on " New Images and Museography " ; commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to write a European report on " Transdisciplinarity and the Emergence of New Art Forms " (1997) ; author of the UNESCO working paper on " Culture and the New Media Technologies " for the Intergovernmental Cultural Conference (Stockholm, 1998). Mandated by the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe) in 1997-99 to coordinate ESPRIT research.

Creator of experimental situations situating gestural and corporeal arts in digital environments, Sally Jane Norman has organised events at the International Institute of Puppetry (Charleville-Mézières), ZKM, and STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam) ; she collaborated on IMUTE with the Aix-en-Provence Art School. Currently directs the Ecole supérieure de l’image in Angoulême.

DEEDS & GESTURES, a creative, playful encounter anchored in reflection, action, and analysis, will convene the practitioners of several " species " of gestural art in a laboratory equipped with mechanical, electronic, and digital instruments (motors, sensors, interfaces, programmes, networks). Characterising and comparing their gestural languages will allow puppeteers, musicians, visual and circus artists to more fully invest synthetic image and sound environments, generated with and by the artists - and sometimes despite them. We shall identify the zones of convergence and divergence of their gestural idioms, testing their discrete and combined resonance via an experimental " Gesamtkunstwerk ", a creative endeavour fired by mechanical, digital, and invariably human energies.

In this exploration of gestural arts, of their respective dynamics and symbolics, primitive instruments will be unabashedly employed alongside the latest digital tools. The resultant mixture of physical gesture and virtual meta-gesture, of high tech and low tech, will be celebrated in improvisation sessions placing enjoyment on a par with risk.