THE MOVING WORDS - Practices of Dance and Silences

Name: THE MOVING WORDS - Practices of Dance and Silences
Start: 2024-11-30T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-12-01T17:30:00+01:00
Location: Fabbrica Del Vapore

Schedule

Sat Nov 30 2024 at 10:00 am to Sun Dec 01 2024 at 05:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Fabbrica Del Vapore | Milano, LO

THE MOVING WORDS
Practices of Dance and Silences
Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Via Giulio Cesare Procaccini 4
Between words and dance - in this intermediary space resides a nuanced dialogue characterised by voice and writing, sounds and silences, traditions, patterns, and innovations.
The most captivating aspect of dance, particularly the one emerging from practices centred on expression, attuned listening, creativity, and a sense of wholeness, demands communication that engages with the body and the sensory, somatic experience. It necessitates embodied languages crafted from images and metaphors, neologisms, innovative punctuation, and strategic pauses. As practices evolved over time, the language of transmission also transformed, with words assuming roles distinct from their historical and semantic functions. In this transformation, the methodological and communicative strategies of individual artists, educators, and practitioners integrate both thought and physicality, offering fresh insights to those who receive them.
How do we identify the word that moves, capable of narrating and naming experiences, addressing the body, elucidating feelings, and facilitating the creation of dance? What pathways of genesis bring it to life? Through action, writing, silence, or thought?
These queries will guide our explorative efforts during the two-day event hosted by DES - National Association Dance Education Society, part of their annual gathering.
We will engage with the insights of artists and scholars regarding the evolving language of transmission and its receptivity to imagery, metaphor, sound, and silence. This investigation into the moving word will also benefit from reflections and experiential accounts from: Silvia Bugno, Doriana Crema, Laura Delfini, Salvo Lombardo, Rosita Mariani, Aline Nari, Franca Zagatti.
In keeping with the established customs of our association’s conferences, spoken segments will alternate with practical sessions, this time led by two distinguished facilitators: Le Quan Ninh (FR), percussionist with a classical foundation who has been interpreting contemporary music and engaging in free improvisation since the early 1980s and Miranda Tufnell (UK), dance artist, writer and teacher in movement and imagination.

PROGRAMME
Saturday, 30th November 2024
10:30 – Welcome
11:00 - 13:30 SHARING OF PRACTICES, THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
• Franca Zagatti Introduction
• Rosita Mariani Conduction_observation_embodiment: experiences and reflections for a possible biopoetics of dance
• Doriana Crema Are they just words?
• Laura Colomban and Laura Delfini in conversation with Miranda Tufnell
• Cristina Negro in conversation with Le Quan Ninh
13:30 - 14:30 – Break
15:00 - 18:30 - PRATICAL WORKSHOPS IN TWO ROOMS
Ground floor seminar room: (for group 1)
Le Quan Ninh – The Nature of Silence
What phenomena occur when we are silent in our minds, ceasing to plan, comment, judge, or engage in internal chatter? What practices enable this silence? What are the aesthetic implications of such silence? Is it absence of action and intuition? Is it disengagement and abdication of responsibility? Or is it a simple step backwards that allows us to discover our place in a larger landscape?
We will engage in exercises on listening, requiring us to 'swing' between concentration and de-concentration to become part of the act of listening.
We will experiment with scores based on listening and spatial perception, creating a collective work nourished by individual attention that transcends the notion of dialogue.
Above all, we will continually return to silence, to the beginning, and persistenly resume from there.
First floor seminar room: (for group 2)
Miranda Tufnell - Surprises of Being
The workshop will be a time to be curious. Landing into the body into breath, stillness and movement- fine tuning our senses and taking time to explore the movements of our responses- to what is both within and around us. Feeling, intuition, imagination all come alive as we listen to the world through our bodies. Yet in our everyday lives we rarely have the words to convey the complex territory of what we see and feel.
For many of us words are loaded with class and cultural associations that can seem to silence or shut away some other deeper self hood. Listening through the words and images that emerge as we open into the body through movement loosens the gravity pull of our over familiar stories of identity. Characters, voices, and fragments of story emerge bringing to the surface more of the richness and multilayered nature of our experience. Writing, as in our dancing, becomes discovery, a window or portal, into ever widening perspectives. In this writing for another - or for something other than ourselves - takes our familiar ‘self’ out of centre - an ‘unselfing’ (Iris Murdoch) that paradoxically unfolds us yet further into surprises of being and perception
Alongside performance and teaching I worked part time for 14 years for a local doctor. I believed what we know as dancers should be common knowledge. I was constantly moved by how profoundly a word or an image sourced in the body transformed the texture and energy (and health) of a person - awakening more of the multitudinous nature of being alive - in such moments words, language, can seem to hold the power of spells.
The sights and sounds which speak most deeply to us
move us
move us
where we thought we were sealed over. (Miller Mair)

Sunday, 1st December 2024
9:00 - 10:30 - SHARING OF PRACTICES, THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
• Laura Delfini Introduction
• Silvia Bugno Scattered Terms. Collective Collection
• Aline Nari Silence listens to us dance. “Danza in Silenzio” between transmission and creative exploration: a research in the making
• Salvo Lombardo Flashforward: assuming the Dance
10:30 - 14:00 - PRATICAL WORKSHOPS IN TWO ROOMS
Ground floor seminar room: (for group 2)
Le Quan Ninh – The Nature of Silence
First floor seminar room: (for group 1)
Miranda Tufnell - Surprises of Being
14:00 - 15:00 – Break
15:00 - 17:30 - Conclusions and membership meeting
PARTICIPATION FEES
130 euro (100 euro conference fee, 30 euro DES 2024-2025 membership fee)
REGISTRATION MODALITIES
In order to participate, it is necessary to fill in the DES membership form https://www.desonline.it/aderisci-alla-des and pay the fee by bank transfer in favour of D.E.S. Associazione Nazionale Danza Educazione Società, current account at Banca Bologna IBAN code IT58B0888302403023000233258 BIC code CCRTIT2TBDB Reason for payment: Conference and fee 2024-2025 (please specify your name and surname in the reason for payment).