MODULE #1

Not About thing - Shannon Stewart

 
 

A small protest to always having to explain/propose/know/articulate in language what work or practice is about, in Not About Thing, we will witness and expand meaning making that comes through the language and archives of our performing bodies in relationship to queer theory and ecology--switching modes, researching theories, moving continuously, making and breaking small works together.

Being “not about” is a dispersal strategy and an ecological fact of bodily constitutions. It explores porousness versus hard lines and edges within us and among us, through various perceptual inputs that inform and show up in creative process.

What do we absorb and reciprocate experience with our environmental neighbors through our living, sensing bodies? What does our practice and work tell us about what it is rather than the other way around? How do we create more unknown spaces in a pressurized culture to have a stance, make quick content, and access readily available algorithmic answers to every question? “Our work” can be how we arrive in a place, how we show up as a collaborator, how a prompt manifests in motion, how the objects, technology and forms around us intersect with identity and place, how we build a community of practice to human and beyond human collaborators and approach work as part dialogue, ritual, relationship, and opportunity to practice care.

 

Shannon Stewart is a choreographer, writer, and assistant professor in contemporary dance. Her/Their practice and research connect technical and somatic dance methods to theories of gender, labor, and ecology through writing and interdisciplinary performances. Shannon’s work has been presented in the U.S. and Europe on stages, screens, and in galleries, most recently touring Mexico, Croatia, the Pacific Northwest and Gulf South.

Shannon has been a generative member of the communities she’s a part of from a young age, initiating arts organizations, archiving the work of underground scenes, and continually scaffolding opportunities for artistic processes and more participation in the arts where there are gaps. This influences the form and feeling of her work as it often takes place in unconventional settings, brings dance into conversation with other issues and modalities, and uses choreographic thinking to imagine new possibilities of meaning making.

Shannon’s work has been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project (finalist), National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and residencies from the UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, among others. Her poetry has recently been published by Planet Detroit in their ecopoetry series.

Shannon has a Masters of Fine Arts from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. In the university setting, Shannon teaches Countertechnique™ , improvisation, Performing Gender and Sexuality in Dance, and interdisciplinary choreography.  She is on faculty at the University of Kansas and is a core faculty member of ROAR Berlin.

MODULE #2

dreaming reality - anna nowicka

 
 

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 image of your everyday life? What if they reveal to you a personalized, inner map depicting numerous choices you face, and possible responses to your waking life? What if they are the key to creativity?

Dreams are showing you where you are. They are “news from the body”.

Every night, in a series of short journeys they present challenges you are currently facing, and possible resolutions. They show you what you desire, and what you fear; what you crave and what you despise. They show you an unconditional potential to grow into YOU within a community. If you can understand the poetic, non-linear language of your dreaming, an interactive, clear and very actual map unfolds. An accurate possibility of choice follows. You are capable of choosing and co–creating your waking life.

The work begins with an awareness and sensitivity practice that opens up the body to create from what currently is, from the constantly changing “here and now.” We learn to notice the flow of sensations, images, and feelings. We learn to choose which one to follow and embody. By ‘shifting the eye’ to different places within the body and without, attending to the rhythm, space, emotion, form and story, we become present and responsive. We turn what we experience and see into unique dances and instant choreographies. This practice is explored in solo research and with the presence of an observer, embedded in the living tissue of the whole group.

We work with night dreams and with waking dreams, unfolding from an improvisation. A singular dream is opened by other participants, revealing potential, always available, yet often unseen aspects of the self. We learn to recognize and precise dreams’ storyline, and its' relations with waking life; we discover repeatable patterns; we find a question, which forms dreams’ compositional axis and leads to a hidden treasure of a new reality.

We apply dreamwork to choreographic practice, opening any image, situation and form, responding to it from a place of rested, attentive awareness. The work combines intuitive ways of creating with conscious choreographic decisions. We move playfully between waking life and dreaming, between doing and observing, expanding an awareness of the endless flow of impulses, able to choose which one to follow, form and manifest. Working with questions allows for a poetic way of composing, weaving movements in a non-linear, associative manner that fosters connections between seemingly unfamiliar materials.

When the outer signposts lose their validity, a radical re-turn within is the only possible direction. The message of the inside becomes an action I take in my waking life. From a dialogue of dreaming and waking reality, a sense of belonging, individual and collective responsibility unfolds. I create my and our future in the “here and now” of my choosing.

 

Anna Nowicka is a Berlin based choreographer working with dreams and embodied imagination. She aims at unfolding the body into a resourceful, fully alive, ever flowing entity, response-able and present. 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 at the Polish Film School in Łódź. She is a certified Sapphire® practitioner of Dr. Catherine Shainberg’s “The School of Images”, and a graduate of the “E-co leadership certification program” at George Washington University. She holds a PCC certificate from the International Coaching Federation. Anna is an adjunct faculty at the “International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery®,” and the director of “Dream Your World Kids®,” where she teaches how to use dreaming and spontaneous imagination as tools for creativity and transformation. Since 2019 Anna has been a regular educator and mentor at UdK Berlin, HZT Berlin, AdBK in Nürnberg, Arts Academy in Szczecin and Polish Film School in Łódź. www.annanowicka.com www.mapsofdreaming.com

MODULE #3

non natural nature of - Sonja pregrad

 
 

In this 5 day workshop we’ll immerse into non natural nature of body, language and performance, through devices of drag, somatics, poetry and materiality.

My practice has been evolving around the issue of the objecthood - of the body, of the dance, performance, as an anchor for feminist, queer and sensorial politics. Emancipating the figure of a dancer, I question this subject-object paradox that is her performing body.  From object I plunge into materiality, embodiment, touch, synesthesia, sensuousness, receptivity and submission (oscillating with assertion) - as vehicles for performance. I bring my practices around drag, materiality/objecthood of dance and reciprocal acts of performativity and offer different proposals for your explorations and making interests.

Each day we’ll work through conceptual and practical sequences like: make-up - face - matter - sprout; throat - text - image - utterance; body - gaze - touch - digit; somatic - fantastic - mundane - virtuous. The workshop will bring in somatic and fantastic entrances into movement on one’s own and in relation - to the group and to the other entities we can be present to.

We’ll find simple shapes to share - learn+make+practice: lines, vibrations, weight etc.

There is a couple of ideas that move my work that I am bringing in as possible inspirations for collective practice and conversation:

 <3 I am interested in imagining/creating/observing of something I call an Object of Dance - an event arising in our observing through texturality of sensations (through patience both of the mover and audience. Dancing as simultaneously moving and being moved by the world, the dance, the gaze).

<3 Also, I am curious to together look at performativity (drag) of dance:

- What does it mean to dance for / in front of another?

- Dance’s lineage, archive; it’s historicity / it’s self - referentiality / it’s image.

- What is dancing in the studio / on a site / in performance / professionally / as a gesture of seduction / as a gesture of psychological (affective) transfer.

- How is it to be dancing while self-objectified by the image culture (driven by the recording/analogue/virtual/digital dispersion and encampment of the image).

<3 Inspired by our capacity for observing as our non natural nature and by the recent experience of queer pregnancy and motherhood I want to propose to look at the idea of drag as (un)mothering - of the politics of matter by means of sensuality, that is erotics of sensing.

In thinking these terms, I am influenced by Victoria Sin, Susan Stryker, Sara Ahmed, Vivian Sobchack, Siegmar Zacharias, Maria Scaroni and Maria Silk.

I will propose looking into drag as (un)mothering by practicing:

- Gestures, arrows/(vectors/lines) and areas (in our relations, on our faces, our words, bodies, space).

- Non natural nature of language voice speech word text poetry utterance - to collide language make up and drag make up.

- Collective constellating (making condition) needed for this (un)mothering / babydom to arise.

 

Sonja Pregrad is a Croatian choreographer, performer, teacher and performance curator/organiser. She holds an MA Solo Dance Authorship from Universitaet der Kunste Berlin and has also studied at ArteZ institute in Arnhem, SNDO in Amsterdam and Codarts in Rotterdam. For her choreographic and performance work she has received three Croatian National Theatre Awards and 5 nominations, four Croatian Dance Associations Awards and a special mention of 26th Slavonian Biennale, and has also been awarded for the organisation and curation of the festival Improspekcije. In her work as a choreographer, dance is always thought of as a relational gesture, her choreography extending from re-inventing body-based practices to re-appropriating performance formats. Sonja makes works on her own and develops different long-term artistic collaborations, performing her work internationally. She has been involved in different initiatives within the art communities of Zagreb. She cofounded (and is director of the) festival Improspekcije (since 2007), associations Fourhanded (2013) and Object of Dance (2021) and Antisezona (2019) - a collective running a program of performance art at Contemporary Art Museum in Zagreb. As a performer she has been working with choreographers Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz, Isabelle Schad, visual artist Sanja Iveković, and others. She has been continuously teaching at the New Media department of Fine Art Academy and Dance department of Dramatic Art Academy in Zagreb as well as at ROAR Berlin independent program, Impulstanz festival etc.

WEB improspekcije.com & antisezona.space

INSTA pre_pre_pre_sonja

MODULE #4

radical pleasure calistehnics - Maria scaroni

 
 

This workshop is for all those bodies that wish to deepen the felt sense of pleasure, raising consciousness on the politics of feeling. 

‘Feeling good’ is a commitment to feel, though feeling trespasses sorrow, doubt, heartbreak, fear, anger, discomfort. We gather here to practice and play to articulate sensations and shapes to become resonant with each other.

Pleasure is somatic, that is, physical-intellectual-spiritual-emotional-social.

The body, alone and together with others, has implicit technologies to awaken the sense of connection with the vitality to which we belong. Mirror neurons prove that we evolved through empathy, entrainment shows we organize around a beat, gravity allows for prayerful cycles of rising and decaying…..

this time together aims to be a welcoming container to dispel the myth of normality, a gentle Erotic-Political-Sensorial Psychedelia where we alone and alone-together get to use dance technologies towards mutual empowerment and liberation. 

Why feel and feel ourselves if we risk being harmed? Who can afford it and who can't?

How do we educate or dis-educate ourselves to pleasure? Who taught you to feel good?

To quote Adrienne Maree Brown in 'Pleasure Activism, the Politics of Feeling Good', where they ask "What would it be like to center pleasure as an organizing principle?"

The workshop is a polymorphic collection of practices derived from:

  1. Choreographic research based on improvisation and altered physical states///Collective guided trance journeys, hands-on experiential anatomy puzzles, performance as radical gift.

  2. Queer raves///Consent games, contextualization and tributes to ‘the beat’.

  3. Fascia-informed somatic activations and active resting/// Fascia and Yin Yoga tuning.

 

Maria F. Scaroni (IT) has been active in the Berlin dance scene since 2004, both interpreting and choreographing works and building community through teaching workshops and hosting events. Trained independently, between 2004 and 2014 landed in San Francisco where she met, trained and collaborated with artists such as Sara Shelton Mann, Jess Curtis, Stephanie Maher, Keith Hennessy, Guillermo Gomez-Peña a.o.. These encounters deeply shaped her physical and performative practice, where dance is intertwined with healing, queer methodologies, social justice and radical play. Her workshops and curated events swell beyond the dance field and include dancers, queers, theater makers, visual artists, academics, social workers, ravers, activists. Since 2011 Maria regularly teaches at the BA and MA programs at HZT Berlin and numerous international dance festivals and educational programs. Part of Maria's performative and educational inquiry is evolving aspects of the work on physical states and improvisation as collective dialogue developed by Meg Stuart, with whom she closely collaborate since 2009 (Politics of Ecstasy, Auf den Tisch!, Built to Last, Sketches/Notebook, City Lights, Until Our Hearts Stop, Waterworks). In 2016 Maria joined collective Lecken Berlin, organizing community around queer feminist praxis and rave culture, meeting the intersection between art and activism. Currently her work hybridizes somatics with collective rituals, where dancing is the mean to help reconnect the social bond (Totentanz and Tanzregreß, Tanzkongress Dresden 2019 and Technodrift, a free technology of ecstasy and a choreographic intervention, offered to survive isolation during Pandemic). Since 2021 she is hosting Social Pleasure Center, a community space for somatic post-activism, queer feminist joyful militancy, radical redistribution of resources and temporary social choreography.

https://www.allalways.org/  https://www.socialpleasure.center/

Photos: shannon stewart, Stella Horta, Nina Djurdjevic, Adam Carey.