Charlie Morrissey was in residence at iC4C for a week between Monday 29 November and Friday 3 December.
His partner and collaborator Rob Hopper worked from Wainsgate Chapel, developing a channel between these two places/spaces explored as both real and imaginary locations.
Charlie explored bridging space through live and recorded interventions working with a camera, a computer and live-action words, working inside and out, wandering between streets and fields and finding ways to bring the two together.
Charlie has an interest in how a space is transported from one place to another and how people and places can be viscerally experienced from afar. 2020 and 2021 has been a time in which Zoom and other online platforms constantly locate distant places in one virtual space suspended somewhere in between; everybody everywhere and somehow all in the same place.
Charlie and collaborators looked at how we can experience substance and liveness through online platforms and how other times and places and realities can find their way into live events. Charlie resisted offering online for the longest time because of his dedication to live encounters – to the physicality of being in the same space with other people.
After starting to do things differently, it made Charlie aware of the potential for interaction and experience in virtual encounters become accessible to people who otherwise couldn’t be there.
During this time, Charlie hosted regular online Open Practice sessions and also regular online sessions with a group of artists using Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores as a system of communication for composing collaboratively, in which the potential of interactive composition for the screen became a very live and engaging experience.
Charlie is thinking about bridges between places, about how to experience the presence of someone in another part of the world and how to offer someone an experience of where he is/what he’s doing/seeing and visa versa.
As part of the residency, Charlie offered Open Practice sessions in a virtual space to practice dancing. Charlie and participants made experiments with online encounters that were accessed during the residency while in Nottingham and Yorkshire, morphing one place into the other.