Contact Improvisation as Physical Poetry

Name: Contact Improvisation as Physical Poetry
Start: 2024-05-04T10:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-05-05T17:00:00+02:00
Location: Fudoshin Dojo Leipzig - Philippe Orban

Schedule

Sat May 04 2024 at 10:00 am to Sun May 05 2024 at 05:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Fudoshin Dojo Leipzig - Philippe Orban | Leipzig, SN

A workshop in Contact Improvisation explored as bio-mechanical play and experiential art.
When: 4/5 May, 2024 10h – 17h Saturday/Sunday
Where: Leipzig, Germany
Fudoshin Aikido Dojo Josephstraße 45 in Leipzig (a convivial, focus-inspiring space with a padded floor)
Registration info… see website, www.bodyresearch.org
Contact Improvisation is a 40 year old art-sport exploring the possibilities of bodies moving through physical contact: support, flow, resistance, lifts, and falling together through space.
The workshop will be one part technical work to two parts poetic exploration. Technical explorations develop functional physical awareness of self and other. Poetic explorations investigate art-making and poetic sensibility in movement together through physical contact. We develop tools and perspectives for distilling and diversifying our explorations of physical contact. We use the metaphor of “poetry” in creative exploration with these tools. The technical work is both a pleasure in itself and a tool for more refined art-making.
The felt experience…
One of my dance teachers, Joe Goode in San Francisco, emphasized the “felt experience” … not simply the technical tumble of bodies and chain reactions of response, but feeling the details and playing with ineffable “meaning”, interior pleasure, and real, present curiosity. This felt experience will be a guide.
Technical work…
Part of the workshop looks at the mechanics of two bodies moving together, expanding our movement possibilities with lifts and shared falls. The technical work is based on the Passive Sequencing work. Developed out of principles from contemporary release technique, Alexander technique, and practices from the internal martial arts, Passive Sequencing cultivates finer awareness of our own body use and how we affect the state and body-use of our partner. We increase moment-to-moment functional awareness through tuning into proprioception – our physical experience of the body. Through noticing and releasing nervous reactivity, we find greater ease, speed, softness, and power.
Physical Poetics…
In the rest of our time together, we explore a poetic play with experienced meaning in movement and the senses. “Meaning” may be in the pleasure of kinesthetic experience, curiosity, and physics. It may be in the poetry of sensation, emotion, and experienced image. We begin by distilling specific mechanical processes or sensory foci. As with writing a poem, there is a blend of intentional composition and artistry with improvisation and felt inspiration. We play with identifying and holding onto foci of curiosity in the dance in a sense of collaborative art-making that moves us. Themes are articulated modes of interaction and are only limited by imagination… skin, slowness, playfight or martial dance, architecture, momentum, image, texture, pressure, comfort, ease, slipperiness, character, small flights, or perhaps something else clear yet un-nameable… they are experienced foci or processes that we can use to creatively channel an improvisation.
The poetry is the poetry of inner experience shaped by and interlocking with the physical. The goal is a blending of felt meaning and artistry.
Holding this sense of “poetics”, we aim for a new kind of contact jam.
For this workshop, Karl will be pulling from research questions from his interactive performance works, Axolotl, Proximity, and Tocame.
Logistics:
Fees: 140 -240e sliding scale (pay what you can within the range).
Early registration: 100-240e if registered by 6 April, 120-240e if registered by 20 April
Registration: see website
https://www.bodyresearch.org/leipzig-contact-improvisation/human-contact/