Simon Ellis

Simon Ellis is a choreographer, dancer and film-maker interested in practices and ideas to do with (not necessarily at the same time) power, responsibility, memory, dialogue and screens. He trained as a dancer at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, and his choreographies include Full (2001), Indelible (2003), Inert (2006), Gertrud (2008), Desire Lines (2010), and Pause. Listen. (2014). His film projects include Then/Now (2008), Tuesday (2009), Anamnesis (2010), and we record ourselves (2016, with Katrina McPherson, Owa Barua, & Natalia Barua). Simon collaborates with Colin Poole as Colin, Simon and I (colinsimonandi.com) and most recently they presented Our White Friend (2016) at Independent Dance in London.

Simon has a practice-as-research PhD from the University of Melbourne. The research explored liveness, improvisation, documentation and remembering, and was presented as a DVD-ROM. His work as a scholar includes understanding ways of knowing through writing, choreography and film, and in supporting the development of practice-as-research (see practiceasresearchblog.wordpress.com)

www.skellis.info

My research is fundamentally about how creative practice and performance might help us develop and understand ideas, relationships, politics and people. I do this through a range of practices and activities including performance, improvisation, screendance, dialogue and writing. I’m inspired by working closely with collaborators and students to help reveal and question our limitations and assumptions about how we see the world, and how it might be imagined and described in alternative ways.