Create Lab Development Fund Award Announced
4 October 2024
Elizabeth Rose Arifien (photo by Trevor King) & Sian Fan (photo by Alina zum Hebel)
East London Dance and London College of Fashion are thrilled to announce the 2024 recipients of the Create Lab Development Fund Award.
Create Lab alumni Elizabeth Rose Arifien and Sian Fan have each been awarded £3000 to develop a project that combines technology, movement and costume. Each project will be presented at the Digital Body Festival, curated by Alexander Whitley, in Hackney Wick, 15-17 November.
About the award recipients and their projects:
Elizabeth Rose Arifien is a film Director, Choreographer and Music Artist who creates emotive performances, placing personal and societal complexities at the forefront of creative conversations.
Her projects have represented a pursuit for truth, celebration of diversity and escapism. Through her desire to make the arts more accessible, she unites individuals and communities and lets her movement speak boldly and profoundly where words often fall short.
“An opportunity to enter the haven of neurodivergent artists, this piece is a multi-layered dance performance that will take us into a transcendental space, unifying dance, costume, technology and music.
It offers the audience an opportunity to step away from language and explore a sensory world. It’s an invitation into the sphere of someone who processes the world through their creative means, in the hope we can celebrate one another’s uniqueness” Elizabeth Rose Arifien
Sian Fan is a British/Chinese interdisciplinary artist currently based at Somerset House Studios. She has exhibited internationally with venues including Tate Modern, British Council, and the V&A, as well as producing work with Channel 4, the BBC and Facebook.
Her work combines movement, the body and technology to explore embodiment, spirituality and human experience in the digital age. She is particularly interested in the uneasy synchronicities between Asian and cyborgian bodies; in popularised depictions of Asiatic bodies in anime and video games; and in the thresholds of human identity where one exists as both and neither at the same time.
“Incantation is a digital performance combining dance, motion capture and video gaming to explore liminal states, magic and myth in the digital age, and the commodification of the Asiatic body.
Creeping into the den of a part-plant, part-human creature, the work meditates upon being caught between worlds, a state that extends as much to our existence as mediators between physical and virtual realms as it does to the experience of growing up between cultures.
The work interrogates how spiritual and ancient beliefs can coexist with technology, infusing lore and legend with video game aesthetics to mix modern and mythological stories.” Sian Fan
Creative Lab is an East London Dance and London College of Fashion partnership programme giving emerging costume designers, choreographers and creative technologists the opportunity to come together to explore these different areas of practice and form interdisciplinary groups to develop ideas. Two Creative Lab Grants are awarded bi-annually to alumni of the programme who apply to develop their ideas further.
GDIF’s Dancing City 2024
Announcing our next OUR HOUSE takeover