Somatics & Butoh workshop “From spinal liquid to Hydrofeminism”
Somatics & Butoh workshop
“From spinal liquid to Hydrofeminism”
“Water is always sometime, someplace, somewhere. Even in our aqueous connections, bodies and their others/worlds are still differentiated. The question, then, of “what is” is never sufficient. How is it? Where is it? When is it? Speed, rate, thickness, duration, mixture, contamination, blockage. If we are all bodies of water, then we are differentiated not so much by the “what” as by the “how”.”
Neimanis, Astrida. Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.
We want to propose a sensual and critical research on our liquidity and by that blur our mainstream structures of thinking, embodying a porous utopia through a more-than-human perspective.
We dive into our cerebro-spinal fluid combining practices inspired by BMC and Continuum, and reemerge from our sensation to improvise, following what butoh dance can teach us about the relation between surface and depth, outer and interior awareness at same time, inquiring the non-dualistic potential of our attention.
Embracing the necessity of a political awareness in dance, we invite the medium of text to flood and disrupt our patterns of movement. During these days we are specifically working, deconstructing, reconstructing, dancing and maybe not understanding the text of A. Neimanis “Hydrofenism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.”, exploring new ways of reading. We use the art of movement to establish a different relationship with words and concepts, to let the flesh read and listen, to allow the organs to conceptualize the oppressions and crises of our times.
Through a crossing of disciplines such as Butoh, somatics and contact improvisation, anthropology and poetry we intend to play with the liminal possibilities of performance, as well as with extended scores to allow a deeper questioning of ourselves in interaction with the environment and its unobtrusive perspectives. Improvisation and dance call for a political and irrational attempt to perceive and re:discuss our ecologies and affects.
When: 3. & 4.02.2024 from 10am – 4pm (with short pauses)
Where: Barnes Crossing, Cologne
Price: Sliding Scale 115- 150 Euro
Info and Registration: reversed.dances@proton.me
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Fil’s bio
I see identity as a study of multiplicity. I am a dancer, anthropologist, cook, skipper, apprentice mason, activist, poet and a gardener. I calibrate my artistic work to apprehend the eco-social falls and flaws of the planet we inhabit together, in a confluence of flesh, poetry and politics. I live in Larret, a place of collective living and research in dance, somatics, relationship to the earth-matter (crafting,cooking, cultivating), alternative pedagogies. Filippo and Franziska recently co-founded the Reversed dance company .
The resources, methods, techniques that accompany me and shape my practices are: butoh, contact improvisation, somatics (BMC, Alexander Technique, authentic movement), books and the minds that write them. I thank and name some of the people who have influenced my body: M-T Sitzia, Matthieu Gaudeau, Asaf Bachrach, Moeno Wakamtsu, Masaki Iwana, Atsushi Takenouchi and Hiroko Komia, Minako Seki, Imre Thormann.
Franzi’s bio
Born in 1991 in Altenburg, a city in the territory of former GDR, I consider myself a child of the circumstances in which I was born: a post-socialist period of transition into neoliberal capitalist values, surrounded by left-overs of the second world war.
By the time, it turned me into an unsettled, curious mind and activist. Deeply interested in the riddle of existence and the need of social- ecological transformation,I started weaving a web connecting dance, alternative pedagogy and political activism.
My dance practice is rooted in the principles of Butoh, which I consider a practice of listening to the in-between, of standing at the edge of the visible and invisible world. A place, where all oppositions can finally meet and conversate. Where we can sense the proximity of qualities and the beauty and necessity of difference. A place to inquire what it means to be „human“.
I thankfully carry the influence of Minako Seki, Atsushi Takenouchi, Maruska Ronchi, Motoya Kondo, Tiziana Longo, Yuko Kaseki, Eva Leemans and Enrico Paglialunga in my body. My practice is also informed by Continuum Movement as an somatic practice, Contemporary Dance and martial arts.