Syllabus IV will be at Studio Voltaire, London, during the weekend of 1–3 February. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting London for their third retreat with the theme 'Voice, Playfulness and Politics'. 

Friday

Following a breakfast and Welcome in McDermott & McGough’s The Oscar Wilde Temple, Artist and musician Jenny Moore will lead a four–hour workshop based on her own compositions and those of other female artists. The group will experiment with vocalisations, singing and listening as tools for collaboration and production. Vocal exercises such as ‘aural tuning’ will explore embodied knowledge, melody as a source of mantra and locking into rhythms to physically understand the potential of political performance and protest but also transformative social interactions. The day will end with an optional trip to a sauna.

Saturday

Day Two will include an introduction to live action role-play with Jamie Harper, a theatre director and game designer who specialises in Nordic-larp. This will be followed by an introduction to white voice techniques with Monika Walenko and a dinner.

Sunday

Day Three will comprise artist presentations in the morning, followed by a writing workshop with artist, writer and musician Morgan Quaintance.

Reading

• Charles Fernyhough, ‘Chorus of Me’ in The Voices Within 
• Cookie Mueller, ‘Secrets of the Skinny’
• Sharon Hayes, In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You, 2016 
• Francois Bonnet, ‘The Sound Object’ in ‘The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago’.
•Jacob Mallinson Bird, ‘Touching Synchrony: Drag Queens, Skins and The Touch of the Heroine’
 Didier Anzieu, ‘The Wrapping of Sound’ in ‘The Skin Ego’ 

Biographies

Jenny Moore is a Canadian artist-musician based in London whose interdisciplinary practice is noisy and embodied, feeding on her roles as singer, conductor, composer, drummer, performance artist. She plays in the dance-punk band Charismatic Megafauna, leads feminist choir F*Choir, and has recently released an album for 10 voices and 2 drummers called Mystic Business originally commissioned for Wysing Polyphonic Music Festival. Moore collaborates with a group of artists as Bedfellows, leading workshops, performances and talks about consent, desire and life long sex education.

Jamie Harper is a theatre director, play designer and performance researcher. He trained on the Directors’ Course at LAMDA and went on to win the JMK Directors’ Award and National Theatre Cohen Bursary which led to a year as Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio. In 2013, he received a Churchill Trust Travelling Fellowship to research the intersection of game design and drama at University of Miami and, following this project, he has made several participatory performance works that incorporate play including: Archipelago, The Lowland Clearances and The City Limits for Camden People's Theatre, People Vs Democracy at the Free Word Centre, Moving Up (with artist Adam James) for Serpentine Galleries, Nudge, Washing Machine for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Migrations of Cool at the Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick. He is an active member of the Nordic Larp (live action role-play) community and has presented larp works at international festivals including Grenselandet in Oslo, Blackbox CPH in Copenhagen and Minsk Larp Festival in Belarus. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in participatory performance at Newcastle University.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist, writer and curator. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA, Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Jerwood Space, London; the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film Festival 2018, November Film Festival, The Palace International Film Festival, and Videonalle.17.

Monika Walenko Is a vocalist and accordian player with the Warszawa Wschodnia ("East Warsaw Ensemble"). The group aims to preserve the unique vocal styles and traditional repertoire of the Eastern-Slavonic music culture, mostly polyphonic. Warszawa Wschodnia is a mainly vocal ensemble, documents, reconstructs and performs Polish, Ukrainian and Russian traditional folk music. Amongst the repertoire of the group are songs recorded during field trips in Ukrainian Polesia, southern Russia, and in Polish regions of Kurpie, Kujawy and Mazowsze. The group performs regularly at festivals and music venues including Crossroads Festival in Krakow and recently at Café Oto and Pushkin House in London