Laura Navndrup Black

Background

Laura Navndrup Black is a Copenhagen-based choreographer working with dance, film, installation and education. Equally concerned with participation, pedagogy and performance in both global and local contexts, her current research concerns the construction of choreographic challenges which allow intergenerational groups of professional and non-professional performers to collaborate.

Laura holds a BPA (hons) from from Northern School of Contemporary dance, a post graduate diploma in Dance Partnership from Statens Teaterskole, an MRes in Performance and Creative Research from University of Roehampton and is currently undertaking ph.d. research at University of Agder. She is the Danish national representative for Dance and the Child International, an editorial board member at Nordic Journal for Dance and a board member at Forfatterskolen.

Laura is Head of the Dance and Participation Master's Programme and teaches subjects related to dance, pedagogy, participation and creative practice.

Artistic research

The child is present - children and young people as choreographers and choreographic material

PhD studies
Art in Context, University of Agder

This research enquiry approaches the child as choreographer and as choreographic material; as a capable performance maker as well as a particular presence on stage. Through a series of practical collaborations between adult and child, performed for adults, and rooted in the participants’ singular artistic voices, the research attempts to uncover some of the choreographic and pedagogic problems, potentials and resistances thought to arise from such collaborations.

IT WONT BE THE SAME HERE WHEN IT IS NO LONGER NOW

KUV project
DDSKS 2016-2017

This KUV project seeks to identify the artistic and pedagogical potential of a transposed live performance format that is in itself a temporal-spatial challenge. Three rotating cameras at fixed speed allow a 360 degree ever evolving view of the location. The footage from each camera is shown alongside one another, offering multiple views of the same time and space, but not necessarily with the same - or any - performers in the frame. By proposing choreographic challenges or questions that neither the young or the adult choreographers in the inter-generational group know how to deal with - impossible spaces - both parties are prompted to re-assess their approach to audience gaze, time and space, rendering no-one an expert. 

KNOWLEDGE FROM SUBJECT-RELATED PRACTICE 

WIND

Austria, Faroe Isles, Denmark, Germany (2015-ongoing) 

A research and performance collaboration, dealing with air as material. Manifested in the performance sharing ‘It might be windy, it will be dark’, where purely body-driven mechanical movement of air gives the audience a tangible and sensual experience of wind. This project is a collaboration with Austrian artist Lisa Hintereithner. 

BALLET PÅ SKOLESKEMAET

KGL+ The Royal Ballet and at schools across Denmark (2014-ongoing)

Project development, teacher training and development of teaching material. Ballet på Skoleskemaet is a participatory project in which teachers and school children engage with creative dance and choreography to develop their own version of a classical ballet. 

THE CHILD AND I 

London & Copenhagen (2014-2015), with presentations in Brazil, Sweden, Norway and Australia

A practice-led research project. Through one-to-one artistic collaborations involving myself and two children, aged 10 and 14 respectively, I set out to develop a practice that focused on the clarity and integrity of the child’s ideas. However, I found that I had inadvertently set up a provocative situation; the constellation of adult and child in a relationship that was neither parental, care giving, therapeutic or educational in nature seemed problematic, and forced me to (re)locate my interest in the child. What did I want from her? 

Dansehallerne Community

Denmark (2009 - 2016)

Artist, facilitator and project developer on a large number of outreach projects, with a particular focus on schools.

SCAPE 

Finland (2014)

A very slow and quiet pondering on the minute presence of human bodies in a seemingly timeless landscape, this video installation was created in collaboration with local non-professional performers and filmed at dusk in the centre of an expansive meteorite crater on the west coast of Finland.

DANSEBRYGGERIET

Copenhagen (2013 - 2015)

Initiator and artistic leader of Dansebryggeriet, a youth company and artistic development platform offering young people a chance to engage intensively with dance and choreography as art form. 

THE PORTRAITS

Denmark and the Faroe Isles + international touring (2011-2013)

A series of dance shorts starring people from two remote Nordic islands; Bornholm and the Faroe Islands. Along with artist Rannvá Káradóttir this project collected improvised movements and sounds of local people, and crafted them into movement portraits. The video example below is one such example.