Class CI with OTTO and KATJA

FLOW IS SPORT, FRAGMENTATION IS ART

The base for our study is the physical understanding of flow. Considering flow as a mobile, structured mass moving through space – usually spherical pathways – with ease and softness. Practicing flow through listening shifts of weight, escpecially in slowmotion, builds up the common vocabulary for our dances. However, sometimes staying within flow diminishes our possibilities for choices.

This has drawn our curiosity towards how do I make choices as a solo while continuing to attend the dance with other(s), and has brought us to question our habitual patterns of movements. Fragmentation as the loss of learnt responses, refusal of offered invitations, gaps and the braking of the flow will serve us with widening field of possible dances.

The workshop will oscilate in the space of learning and questioning the learnt.

Flow provides us the physical skills, fracmentation gives access to uncommon choices, and by combining both we compose our dances.

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Class WITH JESS CURTIS

PERFORMAING CI

How do we per/form Contact Improvisation (CI)? From its outset, CI has been inextricably entwined with the act of performance. Whether in the performance experiment, Magnesium, or the early performances at the Weber Gallery in New York (both led by Steve Paxton.) The doing of CI has gone hand-in-hand (sometimes literally) with specific practices of perceiving and receiving. From its influence on partnered acrobatics on the largest stages, to the way we watch and feel and listen to each other at a jam, CI and the concept of performance are inextricable. CI was and is part of a movement that both questions the values of spectacular commodified performance and sometimes mobilizes different values in the ways it is performed. In this workshop we will work from the most basic building blocks of experience, unpacking sensation, perception, impulse, affect, cognition, reflex, and reaction in order to create more space between them in which to locate our performing skills. Layering synesthetic sensory-motor skill sets we will ground in and surf through twisting topologies of flesh and blood to enact perceptual acrobatics that bring us into new dimensions of world. Is freedom the state of having choices, or a state beyond choosing? How do our senses in/form, support, interrupt confuse and enable the (inter) actions we call performing? What is in the space between sensing and doing, or is there any space there? How does doing create sensing? How do we enact our perception(s)? How might we perform our perception? How can this way of thinking about experience inform our dancing in a jam or the making of a body-based performance? How do various architectures and social spaces affect the dancing we do? How does something as simple as sitting in a circle, change the way we watch each other? How does my awareness that you are watching me change both of our experience?

+ We will also address issues of presence, connection with a partner, dynamics, virtuosity, utilizing scores and musical accompaniment. + We will develop movement as both virtuosic, performative action and as meaningful theatrical image.

+ We will examine the physical actualities of touch, manipulation, counterbalance, force, resistance, and surrender, both as physical states and as metaphors for interpersonal and intercultural relations.

+ We will examine and practice the state and quality of improvising, looking at a variety of relationships between imagination, action and time. This workshop will be an embodied exploration of cycles and scales of sensing, observing, and consequential action in physical practice. Working from the cellular to the global, we will examine how we sense each other, take action and make meaning while we move. We will give particular attention to the tension between the concepts of presence and performance as lenses through which to observe/view/feel/listen-to/activate the body. Bring curiosity, a desire to dance and a willingness to be seen.

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Jams

A space to listen to the echo of what has been learned, to forget it and to recreate ourselves in what remains, to continue working and to delight ourselves with new discoveries, to release our dance and enjoy it with innocence, to observe ourselves and savor the pleasure of dancing.

Performances

I enjoy your eyes, I guide your look, I want you to see what we can only feel. I have the feeling that you dance with me when you look at me.