Tape, Ping Pong ball and Footstep: A workshop in improvisation with Ryoko Akama

This is the next workshop in our series exploring improvisation as a form of creative play, in connection with ‘Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way’. For this free workshop join sound artist and composer Ryoko Akama in a playful exploration of space, time, architecture, and sound. You will be given a variety of colourful sticky tapes and ping pong balls and encouraged to use your own bodies and footsteps to make sounds. Participants will manipulate the surface and shape of the Central Court space to explore the acoustic potential of the gallery as an instrument.

Ryoko will supply workshop participants with specially designed prompts and provocations intended to encourage playful experimentation and to kickstart creative lateral thinking.

We will be discussing different kinds of ‘improvisation’ ideas as well as recording and listening back to what we will have created.

Ryoko will perform in the space the group has created, with the addition of domestic appliances and kinetic contraptions of her own devising. Workshop participants are welcome to take part in this performance or contribute recorded sounds from the workshop if they wish.

Please book your free place here. 

Who can attend the workshop?

This workshop is open to all ages but any children under 18 must be accompanied by a supervising carer for the duration. The workshop is taking place on the first floor of the gallery and access is available via the Leeds Central Library’s lift to the first floor Art Library and across into the art gallery. If there is anything we can do to ensure the workshop is more accessible or comfortable for you then please email [email protected].

What level of experience do I need?

You don’t have to have experience as a musician or in improvisation to do this workshop, just an open mind and curiosity to play. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes and bring some water.

More about Ryoko Akama

Ryoko is a Japanese-Korean artist working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK. Her works sculpt domestic appliances and scrap wastes with invisible energy, especially interested in heat, magnetism and gravity, into kinetic contraptions. her works are site-specific, infusing both aural / visual occurrence as one entity, creating ephemeral situations that magnify silence, time and space.