MORNING MOVEMENT PRACTICE

FULLY PRESENT:
PLEASURE AND ENERGY TRANSMISSION

WITH VALERIE RENAY

Pleasure is the key to this playful and energising body work with focused energy, rooted in the opening of the senses and inspired by the Body Weather M/B training (M for mind & muscles - B for Body & Bones). This training is combined with a physical exploration of voice production, developing breathing technique and using the whole body as a resonance chamber to increase vocal range and find new qualities, textures and approaches to using voice. Together, we will research ways of being fully present with body and voice with minimum effort for maximum impact, we will sweat and scream, laugh and cry on the way! This training uses the trajectory of the orgasm arch, the concept of the universal pulse as a subtext towards stylised and hyper-real physical and vocal expression. A study of the whole range of human vibrations leading to freedom of creativity. Performance as a ritualistic experience.

Body Weather - an energetic, dynamic and rhythmic movement work-out developing strength, endurance, flexibility and grounding as well as sensitivity, co-ordination and body awareness.

VALERIE RENAY BIO

Valerie Renay is a French Caribbean performer, director, contemporary and electronic pop chanteuse, musician, vocal and acting coach, painter, DJ, and healer based in Berlin since 2006.

Ever present on the international alternative scene as a versatile artist, her performance work and music are concerned with notions of identity, our place in society, our spiritual quest and everyday psychosis. Questions, often confrontational, are asked in a brutal, stylised dreamlike reality. Her vision is raw yet carefully choreographed, holding the emotional body at its core. Her performance, music and teaching are best described as empowering, visceral, and sensual and have taken her to South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Georgia, Romania, UK and everywhere in Europe. Valerie’s training masters include Phillippe Gaulier, Yoshi Oida, and Derevo. Her physicality is inspired by contact improv, release tech and Body Weather.

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AFTERNOON THEMATIC WORKSHOP

DREAMING REALITY

WITH ANNA NOWICKA

When the outer signposts lose their validity, a radical re-turn within is the only possible direction. From a dialogue of dreaming and waking reality, a sense of belonging, collective and shared responsibility unfolds. 

Every night – without exception – you plunge into a dreaming reality. You are carried away by a flood of seemingly unrelated images, dramatic events, unforeseen meetings, incoherent developments and unconventional resolutions. You wake up deeply moved, often wishing to erase this night’s journey. “It was just a dream”, you say. What if these nighttime adventures are not only an assemblage of coincidental pictures, but they weave a precise, clear and deeply embodied perspective on where you are? What if they reveal to you a personalized, inner map depicting numerous choices you face, and possible responses to your reality?

Dreams are showing you where you are. 

Every night, in a series of short journeys  they present challenges you are currently facing, and the possible resolutions. When you learn to understand the poetic, nonlinear language of dreaming, an interactive, personalized and very actual map unfolds. An accurate possibility of choice follows. You are capable of choosing and co – creating your awaken reality. During this 2 weeks journey we will learn to read our inner maps. We will dive into the inner landscapes, orientate in their topography, read the clues and discover their sensed-felt, embodied meanings. We will learn to apply these understandings to movement choices, and to shape our experience into instant choreographies. The practice will combine intuitive ways of creating with conscious choreographic choices. We will plunge into an embodied exploration of night and waking dreams, discovering how images move us, how they shift our presence and shape our decisions. We will engage in shifting the eye within and without ourselves, honing awareness and precising attention. We will move playfully between real and imagined, between doing and observing, expanding an awareness of the endless flow of impulses, able to choose which one to follow, form and embody. With the help of “dream opening®” practice of dr. Catherine Shainberg from “The School of Images” we will plunge into the realm of dreaming. A singular dream will be “opened” by other participants, revealing potential, available, yet often hidden aspects of experienced reality. ‘To open a dream’ means to distinguish basic levels on which the dream simultaneously unfolds: to catch and precise its' storyline, and its' relations with reality; to discover repeatable patterns; to find a question, which forms its' compositional axis and leads to a secret, revealing the way in which a dream can support a shift into a new reality. By immersing into this layering process one receives clear, tangible clues of how to respond to and act in the waking reality. We will learn to apply this procedure to choreographic work, plunging into the practice of opening any image, situation and form, responding to it from a place of rested, attentive awareness. 

The opening week of practice will introduce dreaming material as emerging continuously from the moving body. We will embody singular images, developing their specific qualities, states they induce and dances they jolt. We will follow the way in which they expand into narrations, using storylines as prompts to fluctuate between qualities and shape shift with ease. Working with questions will allow for the introduction of a poetic way of composing, weaving movements in a non-linear, associative manner that fosters connections between seemingly unfamiliar materials. Dreams will unfold from doing. And from looking within we will compose instantly.

During the second week of the work, we will shift into the on-line space. Here, the focus will switch to working with night dreams, and opening them through movement and words. A singular dream will become a landscape, lived and embodied by other participants, mirrored to the original dreamer through a highly performative practice. Although spatially distant, we will contrive a communal space shining with images for the future.   

ANNA NOWICKA BIO

Anna Nowicka (Berlin) is choreographer and performer, plunging into the lush reality of dreaming. She researches the potential of images to expand the body into a state of a continuous becoming. Graduate of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), MA Choreography at the HfS Ernst-Busch / HZT in Berlin and MA Psychology at the Warsaw University, she wrote her practice based PhD on embodied awareness as the foundation for being present. She has completed a basic training in Systemic Therapy. Anna’s research has been repeatedly recognized. She was awarded the DAAD Prize, followed by the choreographic scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Tanzstipendium from the city of Berlin, scholarship from the Gwaertler Foundation and most recently, Tanzpraxis Scholarship from the city of Berlin. Her solo: “the truth is just a plain picture. said bob.” was selected for the Polish Dance Platform, Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and Polish-Israeli Dance Platform in Tel Aviv. „Raw Light” (2017) was chosen to be part of the Polish Dance Network, and “This Is The Real Thing” (2018) opened the Polish Dance Platform in 2019. Her most recent work - „Eye Sea” premiered in December 2019 in HAU, Berlin. Since 2010 her individual choreographic practice is connected with the Art Stations Foundation. Anna is a certified Saphire® teacher of dr. Catherine Shainberg’s “The School of Images''. She is unfolding dreamwork through an intensive exchange with dr. Bonnie Buckner.

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Photography: Kazuyuki Matsumoto, Patrick Beelaert, Elmacita Riza, Manuel Miethe, Kuba Wittchen, Maurcy Stankiewicz, Katarzyna Szugajew and Marta Ankiersztejn