The freedom of the artist is an illusion. Avoiding that problem is impossible. Let's try again. At the beginning of a process of work involving more than one person, there are instructions, not only ideas. Ideas are always intertwined with methodologies, certain traditions, and even ideologies of methods. A closer and critical look into this relationship could be useful, reminding us to check what is between experiment, invention, and manipulation. Is that the space where the illusion of freedom hides itself?

Let us observe the very first (conscious) moment at stake in the process of choreography: the very first sentences and signs, the first instruction that one gives or receives. Negotiation or contemplation of the given instructions and scores never avoid the desire to be free or to do what one wants. Who does what? And from where does one take it?

This workshop is based on an analytical approach, mixed with the wildness of experiment. The major activities will be based on writing scores for movements, rehearsing, and performing them; writing scores and instructions for others, for yourselves, for your favourite performers, and also scores for strangers. A series of exercises will question the relationships between modes of production and their resulting products.

We will create choreographies that will be performed by the participants or others, and these will help us to explore some aspects of the above-mentioned questions. Each participant will be successively dancer, choreographer, and spectator. Hundreds of great shows will be placed into perspective.

www.insituproductions.net

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Meg Stuart 3rd of September - 10th of September Anorexic Spaces. The Ghostlines in Private and Public Spaces

Photo: Jürgen Baumann

Certainly the ghost is unfinished business, unresolved issues, the wanting and not daring, the reaching out but not grabbing. The desire for the second chance - but it's too fucking late. The dance of the ghost is one of suspension, a body hanging and floating nowhere. Perhaps an overly romantic view, as if it were affordable and easy to hang around today. It must be someone moving too fast, their accelerated existence so blurry that you can't recognise them anymore.

Feeding the Ghost
Anorexia could be seen as the ultimate refusal to be human (fleshy and desiring) or could be thought of as feeding (nourishing and inspiring) the ghost. How do we feed the ghost in performance and in life? And aren't we always ghosting our lives in our work?

Anorexic Spaces
Places that make one feel too large, too needy and too hungry for one's own body. Part of the workshop will be to visit those empty spaces, those vacuums in the middle of town, decompressing chambers encountered by just walking around the corner. These are the places that refusal seems to haunt. How can we flirt with death and the dead? How hungry are you and for what?

The Method of Ghosting Oneself
There is an exercise that I use: I call it ghosting oneself. It explores the consequences of detaching presence from action; the mechanics of ghosting yourself, playing with believing and doubting, desiring and refusing simultaneously. Flirting with emptiness, working with one's own presence as something physical and malleable, and experiencing the ghost in everyday life are the starting positions for this workshop. How is absence marked on the body? Moving to a new city, not knowing the language, returning home after a long trip (or from a hospital, from war), having sex with a partner you no longer love. Near-death experiences....

The course will take place indoors (the rehearsal room) and outdoors (the city) with the uncanny omnipresence of ourselves and others, and will be realised in collaboration with the video artist Jorge Leon.

www.damagedgoods.be

The course for Choreography & Dance will be realized in cooperation with Teatr Narodowy

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