Creative Talk: Professor Emeritus Henry Daniel

Wednesday 5 February
13.00 - 14.00
The House Stage, University of Plymouth
Free, booking required.
Everyone welcome

Henry Daniel (Professor Emeritus in Dance, Performance Studies and New Media Technologies) is a practitioner-researcher with a professional background in dance, theatre, and new media via a career that started in his native Trinidad & Tobago and continued in the USA, Germany, the UK, Canada and Mexico.

He has led and continues to lead advances in cultural knowledge by bringing to bear the perspectives and skills of the artist/scholar. Through his collaborations with researchers from the fields of science and engineering, he enables and contributes to technological innovation. As well, his ongoing preoccupation with issues of identity and diaspora and its roots in a colonizing process begun in the late fifteenth century allows him to engage with the issue of how contemporary bodies perform, and hence transform, their sense of place, space, and identity.

In this Creative Talk, Daniel will trace the interconnecting strands of his practice-based enquiry, focusing on his recent work, including: participation in the Digital Black Dance Ecologies Research Lab in Birmingham; his book, Re-Choreographing Cortical and Cartographic Maps: Going West to Find East, Going East to Find West (2023, Intellect Books); and 'Regenerating the Choreographic Archive through AI and Machine Learning Tools', which is an ongoing collaboration with Arne Eigenfeldt investigating the application of machine learning tools on a large archive of choreographic material consisting of rehearsal and performance videos, photographic images, sound scores, visual and stage design, interviews and academic writings.

Daniel began his career as an actor with James Lee Wah's San Fernando Drama Guild and continued in Port-of-Spain with Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He was also a founding member of Astor Johnson's ground-breaking company, the Repertory Dance Theatre of Trinidad and Tobago. In the USA he was a member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Centre Workshop, Pearl Primus African American Dance Company, Frank Ashley Dance Company, Asakawalker Dance Company, the Bernhard Ballet, and soloist with the José Limón Dance Company of New York. In Germany he founded and directed Henry Daniel and Dancers while continuing to work as a member of TanzProject München, Tanztheater Freiburg, and Assistant Director, Choreographer, and Dancer for Tanztheater Münster with Birgitta Trommler. In the UK he founded and directed the performance group Full Performing Bodies, which he still maintains. Henry holds a Ph.D. in Dance, Performance Studies and New Technology from Bristol University's Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television. He worked at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts from 2002-23 and was Principal Investigator for the Tri-Council funded Black Creativity In The Arts, Sciences, Technology And Business (2022-2024).

Wednesday, 5 February
15.00-17.00
The House Stage, University of Plymouth
Free, booking required.
Open to all staff and postgraduate research students at University of Plymouth and Arts University Plymouth

Professor Emeritus Henry Daniel is an expert in transdisciplinary practice-as-research / research-creation. Professor Daniel contributed to the 2003 PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance and Screen) Conference and ran Transnet (Transdisciplinary Network for Performance and Technology) from 2003-05. In 2017, Daniel was a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at University of Bristol.

For this roundtable, we invite all researchers to come and share their current research in an open and generous setting. It's an opportunity to connect with your colleagues' research and to explore the potential for collaboration - particularly the potential for a collaborative project with Professor Daniel. No powerpoints or presentations - the focus is on conversation and exchange.