Winchester (University of)

Faculty Member, Performing Arts

Senior Lecturer & Leader MA Devised Performance

Faculty of Arts, Department of Performing Arts

About

Yvon Bonenfant is an artist-academic who extends voice across media to explore innovative ways of creating, producing and engaging with, live and mediated performance. Using an artistic-research paradigm and a poly-artistic (cf. Costin Miereanu) perspective, he also theorises about, and from, his work to explore the relationship between voice, tactility/the haptic register, embodiment, emotion, visuality, time-based media and the expansion of the possibilities of performance and the live body in an increasingly electronic world.

Yvon's recent performance, installation and media work, including collaborations with Ludivine Allegue, David Shearing, and textile artists Lorna Dallas-Conté, Caroline Mercier and Casey Wasniewski have been shown in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Slovakia, Estonia and Portugal. In 2009 he held a prestigious invited residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in New York State. His work has been supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Canada and Quebec Councils for the Arts (as part of Tunnel Works), EMPAC, Diapason Gallery, Central School for Speech and Drama, ENSA Limoges-Aubusson, Editions/Galerie Talmart, and the University of Winchester. See Yvon's website for further information.

Yvon is a an external member of the IDEAT research centre at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and is a member of the Performance as Research Working Group of the IFTR. This means that he militates for a view of artistic research that engages with hybrid means of communicating the complex results of networked artsitic experiments not only through 'hard' academic writing but also through equally rigorous poetic means, metaphor and even human contact. Indeed, his recent publication *Soie soyeuse* (2009, Éditions Talmart, Paris) writes about performance through touch and sound. Yvon also pushes for a vision of academia as a place of artistic experiment and not merely canonical and virtuosic training.

Yvon has published articles in Performance Research; Body, Music and Dance in Psychotherapy; The Journal of Dance and Somatic Practice; SCAN Journal; Body, Space, Technology; Studies in Theatre and Performance and elsewhere and is on the editorial board of Choreographic Practices.

In 2010, he has initiated a pilot project exploring the notion of Queer (and identity-based in general) vocal touch through artistic creation and theorisation; is building toward a new installation style work for children, and is working toward touring *Beacons* in 2011.

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