Shapes in real-time︎︎︎
This work helps get a sense of how to make choices when placing or moving bodies in space in relation to each other and the room. Choose a boundary where participants can stand outside the playing space and examine the room. Take some time outside the playing space to look at the floor space, ceiling, patterns on the walls, speakers or any other objects. Each participant thinks about what the space needs and makes a choice to enter and integrate their body in the space in a still shape. Anyone can go at any time and make choices based on the room and the bodies placed in the space. Once you feel you have established your position long enough, exit the space, examine the new configuration and make a new choice.  

The still shapes can eventually lead to movement and or text depending on what you are working on. It's also great to add sound, which really influences the choices and creates a distinct world.

In discussion, it's good to have the participants talk about moments that were engaging—certain compositional relationships that connected the whole picture. This work gives us a window into how spatial relationship and architectural choices can be used in powerful ways.
︎︎︎from The Viewpoints Book by Bogart & Landau
Welcome to mapping collaboration, a toolbox for workshopping and creating across disciplines...

In spite of a long history of interdisciplinary creation, from our earliest recorded arts to our present moment, artistic pedagogy has created divisions between disciplines. This has left artists in a "post-Babel" condition where we don't share the same language and definitions. It’s also encouraged artists to develop practices for devising, creating and composing work that are distinct to their disciplines.

The inspiration for this project came from faculty and students at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts where BFA, MFA and PhD programs in Dance, Theatre Production and Design, Visual Art, Film, and Music and Sound all work together in studio settings and playfully experiment with processes of art-making.

We wanted to create a database of projects, assignments and theory that we collect inside the studio and from research happening in other places. We are curious about how we collaborate and how structures reoccur, translate and deviate from one discipline to another.

Composition is central to these processes and offers a base for our approaches and experiments. We are excited about what our students are doing and inspired by the new languages in contemporary art and performance we continue to see develop.

︎︎︎select a category above to build assignments, learn more about how artists process ideas across disciplines and to create a collaborative process of your own

︎︎︎these tools are collected and used in workshops and classes; some are resources from artists; some are quotes about art-making and how bodies think and listen; others are ideas to expand and disrupt your own training and processes.  


︎︎︎Each idea is intentially short- and not meant to be executed as written, but to be adapted to your own practice and specific project/context. Some may be taken in parts or combined with others to spark new ways of training and making together.

︎︎︎submit your own ideas and tools so we can keep building this site!