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Moving forward… PROFESSOR SARAH RUBIDGE is just back from five weeks in Australia – returning to Brisbane, where she presented a major multimedia work global drifts. Sarah, who’s worked at the University for more than 10 years, is a Research Professor in the Dance department, specialising in choreography and new media. Sarah’s role is a very new kind of dance professorship – a practitioner scholar, one of just two or three to be appointed in dance in the UK. “It means I am both a practising artist and an academic,” she said. “I write and work collaboratively with other artists on interactive installations and digital choreography, an expanding field incorporating digital images that may or may not be derived from human movement – instead of using live dancers.” Sarah, who has also had work shown in Los Angeles, admits to working at the cutting edge of choreography. “I work with composers, computer programmers, neuroscientists, mathematicians and, more recently, geographers,” she said. “The last will stretch the boundaries of dance – and perhaps the boundaries of geography too! “My work is a long way from theatre dance. I am interested in ballet and contemporary dance, and was a dance
critic, but my real interest lies in inter-disciplinary work – and always has. I create and work with digital imagery that is installed and distributed around anything from a small room to a whole campus. If I work with, say, nine projection screens, I work just as if I was working with nine individual dancers in terms of structuring movement in time and space.” Chichester has long been renowned for its engagement with inter-disciplinary work – and that was what first attracted Sarah to the University. The dance department, which allows students to focus on digital media and choreography, currently has around 200 undergraduate students, another 25 on MAs, most being members of mapdance, the University of Chichester’s graduate dance company, and 10 PhD students. “We have a very good cohort of mature PhD students, and attract a growing number of international students,” she said. “Most are professional, practising artists who come to us to do a PhD that is led by their choreographic practice – that’s something of which we’re very proud.” Chichester is already highly respected in the world of dance, and Sarah hopes to see that profile heightened as current plans to establish an Arts Research Centre develop. ■ For more information about Sarah’s work, go to www.sensedigital.co.uk
Flashback to Christmas in August
■ SUMMER SPECIAL International English teachers from around the world are improving their English, and professional teaching skills at the University. This year, more than 250 have attended short-term courses, of up to 13 weeks. In 2008, the University has organised six short courses with Spanish teachers from Madrid and Barcelona as well as servicing three contracts with teachers from the Korean capital of Seoul. The city’s neighbouring province of Gyeonggi also sent 25
secondary school teachers on an inservice teacher education programme. In addition, five contracts with China are on hold after this year’s earthquake in the south west of the country. Co-ordinator Steve Corcoran says feedback from participants also puts the experience of English culture near the top of the agenda for the participants on these programmes. In order to facilitate this, one popular outcome is that course members sit down to a Christmas lunch in August – complete with Christmas pud and party hats!
■ LECTURE LAUNCH Launched in October by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, right, talking on A Church of the nation or a Church for the nation? Bishop George Bell and the Church of England, the Distinguished Lecture Series provides a platform at the University for preeminent speakers in their specialist fields. Designed to provide an intellectual contribution to the community, other lectures include contributions from David Willetts, MP for Havant and Shadow Secretary of State
for Innovation, Universities & Skills, and Baroness Deech of Cumnor, an academic and bioethicist. Guests attending the complimentary series of lectures have an opportunity to hear the very latest views and join in a question and answer session.