East London Dance and The London College of Fashion Arts Programme are delighted to offer early career choreographers alongside LCF students and alumni the exciting opportunity to take part in Creative Lab – Costume | Dance | Technology, an initiative aimed at bringing fashion and costume design, technology and dance closer together.
Each year, a select group of 12 successful applicants consisting of costume designers, choreographers and creative technologists have the opportunity to come together to explore these different areas of practice and form smaller interdisciplinary collaborative groups to develop ideas.
“Creative Lab has opened up so many new doors for potential work and future collaborations” Creative Lab participant
Participants investigate how physical computing, motion capture, interactive design and virtual, augmented and mixed reality can inform practice when combined with dance and choreography. with the opportunity to explore, develop and test ideas.
Comprising a week-long intensive of presentations, workshops and testing time, Creative Lab was launched in July 2017 and took place annually each summer at London College of Fashion’s Digital Learning Lab at Mare Street, until 2022.
Since relocating to LCF’s East Bank campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2024 it continues to take place annually with one year focused on bringing Creative Lab alumni back together and the next year introducing a new cohort of dance makers, costume makers and technologists.
In addition to the Creative Lab programme, London College of fashion and East London Dance also offer the Create Lab Development Fund Award. Two Creative Lab Grants are awarded bi-annually to alumni of the programme who apply to develop a project that combines technology, movement and costume.
Previous recipients include:
- Max Percy – for a project investigating how dance can be made more accessible for blind and partially sighted audiences.
- Zjana Muraro – for a project looking into how neurodiverse people can use virtual reality with dance.
- Elizabeth Rose Arifien – for live performance, Boundless Body, blending dance, technology, and sensory experience.
- Sian Fan – for Incantation, a digital performance installation combining dance, motion capture and video gaming.
London College of Fashion Arts Programme
The LCF Arts Programme seeks to highlight and integrate the College’s varied programmes of research, education, exhibitions, residencies and public programmes holistically. It intends to enable cross-disciplinary platforms for the diverse research and practice occurring at the London College of Fashion and for the multitude of partnership projects with neighbouring and associated institutions.
The LCF Arts Programme seeks to pave the way for a truly publicly engaged campus at Stratford Waterfront that not only allows but encourages public use of the open spaces by programming exhibitions, workshops and creatively usable spaces that inspire visitors, local communities, students and faculty.
