This laboratory with Ralf Richardt Strøbech will focus is on developing material using the body in space, through an organic process of alternately mapping and projecting - seeing and doing. participants will also work on changing the framework of the actions performed, by introducing text, music and imagery .

"According to the theory for which Swedish neurobiologist David Ingvar coined the clever term "future memory", the parietal cortex is capable of producing internal models of movements to be performed, prior to any processing in the premotor and motor cortexes. According to this theory, the brain is constantly simulating movements, only some of which are eventually externalised. This theory could provide a conceptual foundation for the mental training done by athletes and musicians, as well as for re-education through motor imagery. Besides the frontal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex clearly plays a role in voluntary movements, by assessing the context in which they are being made."
Bruno Dubuc, Canadian Institutes of Neuroscience, Mental Health, and Addiction

"In everyday life, we perform actions without giving it much thought.
We are wired for contextual analysis, and for transforming this analysis into valid action.
Through different mapping strategies, we work on building a catalogue of actions derived from everyday life, from the immediate context, from memory, and from imagination.
This catalogue of ordinary actions is then translated into something out of the ordinary by a series of transformations.
This could include copying, repeating, transferring, slowing, speeding, or reversing, but the possibilities are virtually endless.

The material that we are looking for should maintain the recognisability of the ordinary, while also possessing the evocative qualities of the extraordinary. Over the course of the laboratory this material should grow organically, becoming more complex, layered and textured while still allowing for identification and emotional response in the viewer. It is important for me that it is not taken all the way into abstraction."
Ralf Richardt Strøbech

Ralf Richardt Strøbech was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture as well as in music and film studies at Copenhagen University.

From these platforms he works at investigating the cultural mechanisms of his surroundings and to express them in the field between architecture, music and image.

As an architect, director and set designer he works with developing concepts for performances, exhibitions and architectural projects as well as giving lectures and workshops.

From 2004 to January 2010 he worked as Artistic Director of the Danish performance company Hotel Pro Forma. Hotel Pro Forma displaces the notion of theatre into new territories that lie between art and non-art, theatre and non-theatre, between the physical and the metaphysical expression. Performances occupy a space between construction and sensation, consciousness and intuition, concrete and abstract. Hotel Pro Forma moves across the genres of theatre, opera, visual arts and concert. Every production is a new experiment and contains a double staging: partly of its contents and the space, and partly of the notion of theatre itself.

Since January 2010 he has been working independently with his company Loop group.

http://www.hotelproforma.dk/default.asp?ver=uk

For more information or to book a place at the Directors' Forum please contact CPR

Email: cprwww@aber.ac.uk Phone: +44 (0) 1970 622 133 Web: www.thecpr.org.uk

The Directors Forum has been made possible with the support of a project grant from the Arts Council of Wales. The Centre for Performance Research at Aberystwyth is a joint venture of The University of Wales Aberystwyth and Centre for Performance Research Ltd, working in close association with AU Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.