OVERSPILL: A new interdisciplinary research seminar series convened by Dr Sophie Swoffer (Lecturer in Performance)

Overspill is a new interdisciplinary research seminar series which consists of in-conversation evenings and practice sharing events with artists and individuals working across the creative industries. This research series focuses on celebrating the practice of artists who are making important work that also pushes against and explodes beyond the understood boundaries of creative work. Presence and agency will be considered as central themes throughout Overspill and how the artist might use their practice to respond to and/or challenge ideas around self and identity. Moreover, these events will celebrate the work of artists that might be considered marginalised and indeed works to celebrate diversity, equality, and inclusion in the arts. These in-conversation events will celebrate the work of artists working within, across, between and beyond the boundaries of artistic disciplines. Focusing on uncovering the many practices, processes and perspectives that the artist or maker might engage in when making creative practice, this series will also consider post-pandemic contexts and what shifts in processes and new knowledges this might have uncovered for the creative maker. Moreover, Overspill also welcomes practice-based sharings in any format.

All are warmly invited to the launch event Overspill: Presences, Processes & Perspectives, taking place at the SHU Performance Lab (Arundel Gate) on Tuesday 18 April 2023.

The launch event will feature first guest speaker Dr Funmi Adewole Elliott, senior lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University. She holds an MA in Postcolonial studies and PhD in Dance Studies. Her present research interests include dance as a profession, storytelling as performance, the Dance of Africa and the diaspora in the cultural and creative industries and postcolonial inquiry in practice as research. She is also a performer, dramaturge, and writer. She is intrigued by folktales, archetypes, and shared narratives. Her solo performances explore the relationship between movement and story, whether linear or non-linear, and the idea of structure and agency. One of the characters she has created and performs is Debora (2016) a woman who has house but wanders the streets, pulling a trolley, sifting through the objects in it, each as story that did not finish in the way it should, seeking sense in seeing and being seen. Find out more and sign up on Eventbrite.

Overspill: Presences, Processes & Perspectives – Launch event featuring Dr Funmi Adewole Elliott
Tuesday 18 April 2023, 1830-2000
SHU Performance Lab, Arundel Gate Sheffield City Centre S1 2LQ
All welcome, please sign up on Eventbrite.

If you are interested in collaborating with Overspill or would like to be considered to be an artist featured within the series please contact Dr Sophie Swoffer.

 

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Dr Sophie Swoffer is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University. Sophie’s work in interdisciplinary and draws on both Performance and Film Studies in order to re-envisage, challenge and deconstruct the male gaze. Sophie was the conference committee chair for the M4C-funded and De Montfort University-supported 2019 practice-based conference, Cracking the Established Order: Practice-Based Research in Academia. She has guest edited The International Journal of Creative Media Research’s special edition of Exploring Creative Methodologies (June 2020) and has also published to the international Body, Space, Technology journal (2021) and Makings journal (2022).