Postcards
An international dance/film project with young people.

Breaking the Rules
Berlin/Cambodia
Tour of feature film The Return about Kim Sathia, Cambodia’s first professional disabled dancer with a new live performance featuring Sathia and an integrated group of dancers from Germany and Cambodia.

Where We Are Not
A music/dance collaboration spanning two cities, exploring our desire to be elsewhere.

Postcards
We send postcards when we are in a place that we want our friends to see. They are an act of engagement with a place - we select which image we want to show, we write a short message which conveys our experience of the place and we send this communication to someone else – looking forward to hearing their response. Postcards are, at least in part, “showing off” – look where I am and how great it is!

With a choreographer, filmmaker and composer classes of young people will create 30 – 60 second dance films – “dancing postcards” of their city.

Working in small groups, students will choose a location in their city which they would like someone who lives overseas to see; the image they would choose if sending a postcard. They will investigate the meaning of their chosen location for them – why it is important, what it says about the their city, how they relate to it. Inspired by the location and their relationship to it, the students will create movement material, which they will then shoot and edit to make a short film. Working with a composer, they will create a soundtrack for their film.

The films will be developed and formatted for distribution on mobile phones, MP3 players and the Internet. In cities where the infrastructure exists, we will also seek screenings of the films on the public transport network.


Breaking the Rules
In 2005, Jo went to Cambodia to create a piece for Kim Sathia, Cambodia’s first professional disabled dancer. Kim Sathia was a celebrated classical Khmer dancer when she had a road accident and was left in a wheelchair. She stopped dancing. The piece she made with Jo in 2005 represented her return to the stage – a difficult journey which is captured in the feature-length documentary film The Return. The piece became an instant success and was performed in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Hong Kong.

In 2009, Kim Sathia will come to Europe to create a new piece with Jo Parkes, which will tour as a package with the film The Return.

Where We Are Not
If you could go anywhere at all – right now – where would you go?

On the same day, at the same local time, in cities around the world, artists and students will record interviews with people at the local train station. “If this train could magically take you anywhere at all – right now – where would you go?”

The answers will form the basis of a youth project and a professional trio for two dancers and one musician about our longing, or necessity, to be elsewhere.

In a world of extreme mobility, it is increasingly part of the human experience that we long to be ‘where we are not’. Newspapers devote whole sections to exotic destinations; low-cost airlines compete to open new routes (with the contingent effects on the environment); vast movements of populations occur due to conflict or disaster; individuals seek refuge in countries far away from their homeland; increased working hours and rising stress levels make us long for more free time; wealth and quality of life issues tempt families to emigrate; cities become increasingly diverse.