Sinister Intimate

This workshop will develop from the idea of the sinister - the first meaning of this word, "suggesting or threatening evil" will be shifted aside to concentrate on it's secondary sense - "from the left hand side, or from the less controlled side". Obviously this will not be taken literally to mean the physical left side - but rather we will try to privilege the inhabitual, the less dextrous, the maladroit, the hidden, the less controlled.
„We will identify our dear and habitual impulses, both physical and esthetic, not in order to pursue their opposites but rather to locate their hidden, unsettling complementariness. We will start from a physical exploration of the "other" side. Comfortable coordinations and dance pursuits will be upended and destabilized, not to produce choreographic material but rather to generate an unfamiliar state and point of view from which to improvise, direct, imagine and create form. The interesting thing is perhaps that the "sinister" side is still of ourselves, intimate but unknown. I do not have end-goal for the fruits of this exploration - together as a group we will discover what kind of tone, material or thought that these kinds of activities generate and pursue them together. It is possible that the planned structure of the workshop will also be submitted the same "left-handed" approach in order to provide space for the unexpected. Perhaps this will lead us to a kind of discussion (not necessarily verbal) about the implications of "sinister", a word idea that associates the less controlled, the less known and the mysterious with the threat of evil.



Jennifer Lacey
Jennifer Lacey is choreographer/dancer from New York presently living in Paris. Her training and performance experience in New york had a wide range, from 5 years with the Randy Warshaw Dance Company to more experimental and improvistional works of Yvonne Meier and Jennifer Monson . She has been presenting work worldwide since 1991 at venues including P.S. 122, the Kitchen, the Klapstuk Festival, the Vienna Festwochen, ImPulsTanz, Tate Britian Danças na Cidade, the Bienale de Lyon, Montpellier Danse, Big Torino, Tanzquartier Wien, Centre Pompidou, Kyoto Arts Center, the Kaiitheater a.o.
Since her arrival in France in 2000 she has been able to develop in depth her tendency to interrogate the methods of dance production and their relationship to product and form, arriving at work that is often but not always performative.

In the last 10 years, Jennifer Lacey has worked often in collaboration with visual artist Nadia Lauro producing performances and installations. Their last production "Les Assistantes" is currently touring. At present Lacey is collaborating with Antonija Livingstone on a new piece for the Avignon Festival. As far afield from traditional dance performance as the work often goes, Lacey is commited to her essential point of view as a dancer and strives to produce a thinking body of work in which poetics transcend a conceptual basis.

She has taught technique, improvisation, compostion etc. all over the globe for the last 15 years in institutions, studios and festivals. As a teacher Lacey has been influenced by her continuing studies with release technique pioneer Joan Skinner as well as her interest in yoga and Qi Gong. Her teaching, emphasises the form through sensation and action as well as the relationship between process and product. She is currently overseeing the Essaies programme at the Centre National de la Dance in Angers.