Date: 30 June 2022
Time: 7:00 – 9:00 pm
With: Rachel Warr and Will Houstoun
Location: de Brandweerkantine
Language: English
Fee: €5 (regular), €2,50 (students)
Catching your eye
Puppeteers and magicians are masters in directing your attention. They make you focus on one part of their performance and lose sight of the rest. This shows their skillful mastery of techniques, but also tells us something about our own way of perceiving.
In this session, we explore both angles. Puppetry director Rachel Warr and close-up magician Will Houstoun will share techniques they use to steer our perception and create illusions. In addition, we question the ways in which we focus and divide attention in relation to the outside world.
About Rachel Warr
Rachel Warr is a puppetry director and dramaturg from the United Kingdom. Her work has been presented at venues across the UK from The Barbican Centre to Little Angel Theatre and at festivals in Singapore, Turkey, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Canada. Warr is engaged in a number of cross discipline research projects. These include projects with surgical teams and clinicians comparing skillsets of medical doctors and puppeteers; with a bio-scientist and magician exploring ways of communicating embodied knowledge and a fashion designer on a runway show with 1.9-meter-tall puppets.
About Will Houstoun
Will Houstoun is a Member of The Inner Magic Circle and winner of The European Magic Championships. He has a PhD in magic history as well as a Literary Fellowship from The Academy of Magical Arts in Los Angeles. His one-man show Dr Houstoun’s Conjuring leaves audiences astonished by the magic they have seen and fascinated by the stories they have heard. Houstoun is Magician in Residence at the Royal College of Music/Imperial College London Centre for Performance Science, a Research Associate in Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine, and a Research Fellow at The Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute.
What is Training the Senses?
Knowledge is not only acquired visually at schools through language and text books. Learning involves all of our senses: we learn by listening, tasting, smelling, touching – and even by using our intuition. Through Training the Senses participants explore and discover a new vocabulary for all their senses and a new way to transmit experience and acquire knowledge. Training the Senses is a ongoing series by Marres, that avoids any division between the speakers, performance and the audience. Everyone is welcome to join.