MORNING MOVEMENT PRACTICE
MATERIALITIES OF DANCE
WITH SONJA PREGRAD
Five days, five explorations of how different bodily structures (boney, breathing, fascial,..) align, bring the body into initiation, journey and landing and at the end of each day choreograph a movement phrase or a dance. The class will be warming up our spine, our gaze, our touch, our weight-drop, respiration, our feet, ears and attention. We will explore different anatomical initiators and interlocutors of movement and will be doing different somatic, floor, release and energetic sequences. I will introduce the practice of initiation-journey-landing in articulating moving and as well as different tools of embodied attention, so we could use them afterwards in writing our dances with eloquence. We will create the space and time for each person’s movement rhythms and textures to arise.
SONJA PREGRAD BIO
Sonja Pregrad is a dance artist, performer, organizer and collaborator, being based in between Berlin and Zagreb, Croatia. She has been dancing since the age of 3, being too hyperactive not to be sent to do it and being imperfect enough to never be fully accepted to the ‘good dancers’ club, which has left her on a great place at the edge from which she had to keep on asking herself: ‘but what is it actually, what is ‘dance’ really?’ In this, she has been influenced by the post Judson Church lineage and by the somatic teaching of Eva Karczag, Mary O’Donnell, Tony Thatcher and others at the European Dance Development Centre in Arnhem, and later by the practices of Jeanine Durning, Maria F. Scaroni and Siegmar Zacharias at MA SODA in Berlin.
Growing up in an ex-socialist country has probably shaped her understanding of art as always relational, collective and contextualized endeavor. She has been involved into different grass-root initiatives, such as organizing the festival Improspekcije since 2007, questioning the art form of improvisation, being part of a direct democratic body Plenum of Zagreb Dance Centre, engaged in setting up of the FUTUR II – temporary space for people and dance in Zagreb, and running the Fourhanded Artistic Organization, publishing the magazine “Čitanka“ and organizing an annual performative conference. Sonja also organizes Time we meet dance sessions in Zagreb and sometimes joins the Shared Practice format in Berlin facilitated by choreographer Lea Martini. Sonja has collaborated with numerous artists, among which a long-term collaboration with director Willy Prager, as well as with Ana Kreitmeyer, pavleheidler, Silvia Marchig. As a performer she has been working with choreographers Meg Stuart, Isabelle Schad, visual artist Sanja Iveković, and many others.
In her work as a choreographer, dance is always a relational gesture, her choreography extending from re-inventing body-based practices to re-appropriating performance formats. Emancipating the figure of a dancer, she questioned objecthood and subjectivity of the performing body in her research and work for many years, nowadays focusing on the synesthetic properties of embodiment with tactility as a base. She thinks of her work with the movement as embodied and conceptual at the same time, where intuitive resources of the bodymind can be solving and asking questions by dancing, bringing into being ‘im/materials’ that are holding concepts within themselves. She believes that fragility, shadows, being lost and struggling are gifts and some of the best gates to enter celebrating and serving humanity through performance as one possible form of action.
AFTERNOON THEMATIC WORKSHOP
DANCING THE PROBLEM
WITH DIEGO AGULLÓ
This workshop provides a collective research framework to explore the affinity between dance and problems.
In the spirit of an artistic lab, we will experiment in the art of creating practices for dancing the problem. During this two weeks we will create exercises that provide new conditions for dance to happen, or, in other words, we will trigger forms of embodiment by exposing our bodies to unknown conditions, such ad danger and risk.
We will investigate what is the intimate affinity between the Body and the Event: when does the body trigger an event and vice versa. At the beginning Diego will introduce the practice of “Throwing Dance” where dance must be forced to happen instead of being the result of a benevolent desire to move.
When does dance become a problem?
When does a body that is thrown across a space become a difficulty, a puzzle, an astonishing event?
The problematic body - the dance that becomes a problem - is the body whose movement generates a problem in space, a movement that implies a difficulty that hits you and puzzles you.
Dancing The Problem - performance video
We will explore how the mission of articulating problems belongs intrinsically to the practice of choreography. To articulate problems implies to throw out difficulties when bodies become puzzles thrown into the distance, a difficulty that transforms the scenario into a problematic dance floor. Problems turn the situation into a turbulent event, into a domain of dangerous influences. After that Diego will facilitate a process where every participant will create their own personal practice of “dancing the problem”. Identifying what is your problem as an artist or a researcher is a vital task. To define and become aware of these personal obsessions will be one of our challenges: first we will determine what makes us move, what impulses force us to dance a problem. Then we will translate each other´s problems into a series of embodied exercises, which will allow us to experience each others´ practices from tangible physical/performative situation.
During the second phase online, we will set up a virtual space in Google Drive containing a folder for each player. Each folder is the world, the house, the planet, where each player will put their own practices for dancing the problem. This phase corresponds to the time for interaction between players and for creating hybrid practices, visiting other folders and learning other practices or leaving traces, messages, materials...And finally: make your practice public. Injecting practices in the public space. Search for ways, means and circumstances to transfer the virtual game into a specific real life situation.
Flowchart: Diego Agulló
DIEGO AGULLÓ BIO
Diego Agulló is an independent researcher and a dilettante artist intervening mainly in the field of contemporary dance and performance investigating the affinity between Body and Event. His work covers different media such as dance, performance, essay writing, publishing books, video art, laboratories for research, the organization of participatory events as well as the creation of contexts to continue practicing and investigating the relation between the body and the event.
Diego´s frame of research is called Theoros , and it is dedicated to create contexts for learning and investigating the affinity between Event, Body and Theory in the frame of an artistic practice. It deals with the intersection between education and art, dilettantism and professionalism. In this light, the artistic practice becomes a way of practicing philosophy. The workshops are facilitated frames for a temporary collective body to engage in the process of dancing and choreographing a series of practical problems using the methodology of cyclic interval oscillation, a practice that seeks to keep open the relation to alterity.
He is the editor of the Circadian press where he has published Dangerous Dances (2015) in which he analyzes the intimate affinity between dance, the problem, the devil and ballistics, and Betraying Ambition (2017) where he displays a critique to the ideological implications of ambition in the art world, and Risking the Self (2019), an interplay between Philosophy, Tai Chi and Psychedelics. Diego teaches workshops and laboratories internationally and in Berlin he collaborates regularly in educational contexts such as the HZT University, Smash / Roar platform and Affect at Agora collective. During 2016 and 2017 he carried out an interview project under the name Measuring the Temperature of Dance, analyzing the ethical and political conditions of the dance context in Berlin. He is also co-founder of Pinpoint Tv, an online platform for the dissemination and investigation of contemporary dance.
Website 1
Website 2
Photography: Diego Agulló