Bill Shannon

The Condition Arriving (Lecture)

New York Live Arts Studios
Nov 17, 5-6:30pm
$10 / Free with ticket purchase to Touch Update

Free with purchase of ticket to “Touch Update,” $10 without ticket.
The Condition Arriving is an entertaining yet academic lecture that details through storytelling the evolution of Bill Shannon’s invented movement form that he uses for walking, dance, skateboarding and performance art on crutches. Shannon’s framing of a specific subset of his invented moves led to his naming of The Shannon Technique to codify and then teach maneuvers on crutches in relation to the floor and the body to other crutch users. Shannon Technique’s streamlining of weight transitions and crutch manipulations enables a plethora of new choreographies to emerge from a range of crutch users globally. In addition, Shannon’s performances in public space featuring his movement form necessitated the creation of a new lexicon of terms and strategies to frame phenomenology specific to his blurring of the divisions between dance, stunt, performance art and clowning.  Essential to sharing the details of his more extreme movements and complex naming of sociological perspectives, Shannon will employ video analysis to dissect his form and his audiences’ reactions frame by frame as they were captured in public space. Ultimately The Condition Arriving is an introduction to Bill Shannon’s philosophy and disability politic as it is manifested through an ambiguous and complex representation of physical virtuosity and conceptual art.