MORNING MOVEMENT PRACTICE
INFINITY LANDSCAPE
WITH SHANNON STEWART
Infinity Landscape is a daily Gyrokinesis practice geared towards learning, embodying and applying the core concepts of the GYROKINESIS METHOD® for support of our dance and improvisation practices. Gyrokinesis is a movement practice that addresses the entire body, opening energy pathways, stimulating the nervous system, increasing range of motion and creating functional strength through rhythmic, flowing movement sequences. It is an original and unique method, which coordinates movement, breath and mental focus.
This morning practice will include a continuous Gyrokinesis class with additional time to workshop concepts. We will dive deeper into spiraling, breathwork, and expansive sustainable mobility through movement, improvisation and discussion.
SHANNON STEWART BIO
Shannon Stewart has trained in the GYROTONIC EXPANSION SYSTEM® for over 10 years. Along with studying teaching methods of various dance techniques, Shannon is certified as a teaching artist with the Dance for Parkinson’s (D4PD) program. She has years of experience working with a range of movers from professional dancers and athletes to people living with neurodegenerative illness. Shannon loves to help people feel better in their bodies, better understand alignment as well as the more subtle aspects of the occupying and moving through the world in a human body. She continually grows and learns from the diversity of her students backgrounds and needs.
AFTERNOON THEMATIC WORKSHOP
THE DANCE AS AN UNSTABLE OBJECT OF HERE AND NOW
WITH SONJA PREGRAD
I use the word object as a placeholder for the experience of time, space and the body and the relations they create. Can dance be a space for arising of objects of experience?
If (shared) time and space and (co-)embodiment are our professional tools/weapons, how can each one of us utilize them to make and contribute as a dance artist and citizen in the world of today that needs to move?
We are writing this proposal for a hybrid journey next year not knowing how the world will look like, and you will be reading it also perhaps still not knowing, and as we will be doing it, we will still be finding out what is defining our here and now. What is this space of making dancing while not knowing? When what was held onto as definitions is gone, unstable, changed, how can we collectively process that and create situations that themselves decide what is to be, and how, seen or performed or shared?
From last year’s ROAR experience, and other experiences of making things happen in this year, my understanding is that consciously invoked collectivity is one of the strongest catalysts for processing at this moment.
We will perform with and for each other – making performances as objects, diaries, protests, reports, channelings, letters, rituals, workouts, conferences, trip invitations, lottery winning, gifts, burglaries, gestures of touch and more. I would like to propose that improvising is not (just) a space of playing around (which is a very important quality of it), but a protocol for heightening consciousness to the network of energetic relations we are entangled in, and by practicing our understanding, freedom and responsibility in it we can choreograph it.
We will open somatic, conceptual, task or score based explorations of the double dispositive of the time-space we will be working in, one week being collectively present in person in one studio, and the other, being connected through another kind of technology while spread spatially into ‘personal’ spaces and places. Allowing embodied and digital/technological, common and private, collective and individual geographies to collide and to be in touch, we will invoke a place for dance to be happening in the extended here and now. We will be attentive to what is that which will be emerging – textures, rhythms, materialities, and the relations they open up. By playing, contesting, tweaking, choreographing we have a chance to explore a different dis-junction of bodies and gaze, and a different dis-junction of private and public space and time of today.
My understanding of the art of making is that we continuously are doing it - embodying and making choices, being active and receiving, witnessing and being witnessed. In paying attention to this dis-continuous dynamic and the way that each of us is uniquely perceptively attuned to it in their lives and practices, we can learn our crafts and learn to appreciate those of others. The ways you will feel invited to play in this proposal will inform us about possible entanglements of the image and the body/movements, object and relations/events, activity and passivity/receptivity. This is an invitation to practice choreography as a study of ecology of being in the world.
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.
Photography: J.Jackie+Baier, Chipi, Derin Cankaya, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Petar Borovec, Saša Fistrić, Krunoslav Marinac, Stela Horvat