Workroom Conversations

Theatrum Mundi is aCharitable Incorporated Organisation, with the charitable aim of improving the understanding of cities through education and research.We think that collaboration with artists can offer city-makers — architects, planners, engineers, and urbanists — critical approaches to the way their crafts shape the public life of cities.Public life for us is a broad term describing the ways people live together in cities. Politics, communication, and the arts constitute this shared culture as much as the architecture of everyday streets and public places.Our concern is for the ways the public lives of cities, in all their forms, are understood and designed. We aim to enrich these by engaging urbanists in co-production of knowledge, culture, and design, with artists, writers, performers, and scholars.

Theatrum Mundi

Theatrum Mundi is an independent charitable research centre which aims to expand the crafts of city-making through exchange with other forms of practice.  As part of this, we convene an ongoing series bringing different fields into together around questions that are 'in-progress', to reveal connections between the making of different kinds of form: movement, sound, writing, images, objects, and cities.  The Workroom Conversations are ‘backstage’: there is no audience, and they serve instead as settings to work together to challenge and enrich practice together. We would be delighted for you to join as many of these as you would like to.
Choreography as a Dangerous Tool Tuesday 12 June, 6:30pm Room G20 New Wing, Somerset House   Richard Sennett and Siobhan Davies in discussion prompted by The King Dances chapter from Richard Sennett’s upcoming book Dangerous Tools.. 
On Composition Wednesday 20 June, 6:30pm Courtyard Meeting Room South Wing Somerset House   Composer Errollyn Wallen and graphic designer Sonya Dyakova in conversation on finding rhythm, harmony, form and texture on a page and in music.  Join us for a conversation over a glass of wine in a beautiful space at Somerset House.  Free, booking essential
Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. At an early age he became engaged with music, particularly the cello, attending the Juilliard School in New York, where he worked with Claus Adam, cellist of the Juilliard Quartet. A hand injury put an end to his musical career. He briefly attended the University of Chicago, then entered Harvard, studying history with Oscar Handlin, sociology with David Riesman, and philosophy with John Rawls.  Over the course of the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour, and social theory. His books include Families Against the City, The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, Authority, The Corrosion of Character, Respect, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Together, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling. He has had a public career, first as founder of the New York Institute for the Humanities, then as President of the American Council on Work. For the last three decades, he has served as a consultant to various bodies within the United Nations; most recently, he wrote the mission statement for Habitat III, the United Nation's environmental congress. Five years ago, he created Theatrum Mundi, a research foundation for urban culture, whose board of trustees he now chairs. 
Siobhan Davies CBE was a dancer with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre during the 1970s, and became one of its leading choreographers creating work such as Sphinx] (1977). In 1988, she founded her own company, Siobhan Davies Dance. Originally trained in art, Davies was one of the first year's intake of full-time students at the London School of Contemporary Dance. Her works White Man Sleeps and Wyoming have been included on the dance GCE A-Level syllabus. Her work Bird Song is being used in GCSE Dance syllabus as Set Work (2008–2010). She is among the top contemporary choreographers in the UK.  In 2006 Siobhan Davies opened Siobhan Davies Studios, created by architect Sarah Wigglesworth, and winner of the 2006 RIBA award. This marked a permanent change in Davies' work from a touring dance company into a contemporary arts organisation. The new company focuses on the investigation and exploration of choreography and movement within a contemporary arts context. The company produces and commissions new work from live performance to contemporary film, and actively takes part in industry and academic exploration. It also uses its London-based building as a visual art gallery as well as a dance studio space. The company regularly takes part in the annual Dance Umbrella season.
Errollyn Wallen MBE is an internationally renowned composer, librettist and singer-songwriter. Her prolific output  includes fourteen and a half  operas to date and her music has won numerous awards including  the Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music and a British Composer Award. She was specially commissioned to write two large scale works for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games for London 2012. Errollyn founded her own Orchestra X who recently recorded and released a new orchestral album, PHOTOGRAPHY, on the NMC label, recently voted Top Ten Classical Albums of 2016 by USA’s National Public Radio. Orchestra X will perform her Mighty River which will be featured in PRSF’s New Music Biennial at Hull City of Culture 2017, London’s Southbank Centre and in Oxford. Errollyn Wallen’s music has the distinguishing honour of travelling 7.84 million kilometres in space, completing 186 orbits around the Earth on NASA’s STS115 mission.  Sonya Dyakova is an art director and graphic designer, who studied and began her career in San Francisco. Sonya worked with Vince Frost and Kerr|Noble, before joining Phaidon Press in 2005, where she worked closely with the iconic British designer Alan Fletcher. At Phaidon she was responsible for the art direction and design of a wide range of books, from contemporary art and design to architecture and photography. Her approach is strongly rooted in conceptual and typographic experimentation developed through research with special attention to tactile details. In 2011, Sonya re-designed frieze magazine and was the publication's art director for 5 years. In 2011, she received a Grand Prix from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. In 2013, she became a member of AGI, Alliance Graphique Internationale. Sonya runs her own practice Atelier Dyakova whose clients include museums, galleries, cultural institutions, restaurants and fashion brands. Currently the studio is working with clients such as Noma, Foundation Cartier, Rizzoli, Aperture, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth and Vitra Design Museum.

Somerset House

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Workroom Conversations

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