Communal EPIC Fiction
(Communal Experience in Performing Instantly Created Fiction)

This class is meant to address the experiential disconnect between what happens in the rehearsal studio and what happens "on stage". So often in my experience of performing I have the feeling that I loose time, that time inside of the act of performing moves so fast that I feel I've missed the experience somehow.

There can be a strange distance between the actions of my body and my conscious mind. This can be interesting in the context of exploring trance however this class is an exploration of what it is to be fully conscious inside of the altered state that is performance. Can we slow down performative time for ourselves and experience it in all of its bodily and fleshy mystery?

In an attempt to address this question we will approach each class as though it were a performance from its very beginning to its very end. We will begin with a guided improvisational body/mind activation and continue performing together in instantly created fictions. Emphasis is on action, on making and doing things, on imagination. We will at times alternately watch and perform for one another. We will be generous and kind to ourselves and one another. I ask that everyone keep a notebook for reflecting on each class/performance.



BALLISTIC BODY

A ballistic body is a body which is free to move, behave, and be modified in appearance, contour, or texture by ambient conditions, substances, or forces.

This workshop strives to find a new mode of performative expression which is not clearly derivative of performance art, nor of theatre, nor of contemporary dance while perhaps touching aspects of all of these modes of performance. Ballistic Body is an intervention in a space with people and ideas. This workshop is concerned with training the senses in a way that the body can be responsive in a performative situation. I try my best to steer away from proposing an aesthetic or physical ideal and try, rather, to emphasise attention to each individuals physical history with all of its influences: cultural, learned, accidental, or otherwise.

The body is central to this work as the interface for the clashing or synthesis of ideas and concepts. Characters are suggested but not fully formed. They are developed through costuming, speech, and movement in order to provide a level of fictive distance from notions of identity. This semi-characterisation is a strategy I use to facilitate the use of the body in a way that is not locked to static notions of gender or race. This also allows an immersion into the content of the work that facilitates new approaches and a playful circumvention of irony or cynicism.

Language in this work is used not to convey a storyline or reveal a character but to give voice to a process of thought unfolding in real time. Additionally, text can proposition an event into space. It is used to create relationships between subjects and interweave the fictional with what is assumed to be real. Content is collaged and drawn largely from the internet, pulling from numerous sources (news, popular culture, art, the everyday, etc.) and connecting ideas that seem unrelated in order to find new connections amongst them.



Isabel Lewis
Isabel Lewis was born in 1981 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and raised in Venice, Florida. Lewis studied Dance/Choreography and Literary Criticism at Hollins University (USA) before forming the Labor Union with Erika Hand in NYC in 2004. Lewis has presented her choreographic works at several venues such as The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, and PS 122 to name a few as well as several underground project spaces and galleries in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

Lewis was a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Fresh Tracks Residency Recipient in 2005-2006 and has also received support for her work from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, New Museum, Harlem Stage, MAP Fund, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

She has worked as an editor and writer for the Movement Research Performance Journal and was the curator for the performance series, Body Blend, at Dixon Place from 2005-2008. As a curator Isabel has also worked on the MR Festival 2004: "Improvisation is Hard" and the MR Festival 2007: "Reverence (Irreverence)" as well as "Re-Imagining Utopia: Austrian/NYC Dialogue" in partnership with MR, the Austrian Cultural Forum (NYC), and Tanzquartier Vienna.

As a performer Lewis has worked with Miguel Gutierrez, Ann Liv Young, Levi Gonzalez, David Neumann in NYC and Jasna Layes-Vinovrski and Tino Sehgal in Berlin. Lewis has also created and performed in two performance works and a film for LEWIS FOREVER, a performance collective comprised of herself and her three siblings Sarah Lewis, Ligia Manuela Lewis, and George Lewis Jr.

Important to Lewis's ouvre are the multiple modalities that comprise her art practice such as curation, critical and theoretical writing, teaching, and performance. They are regarded as different vantage points from which to observe, experiment, and experience ideas. By inhabiting various roles within her field she attempts to subvert the dialectics of theorist and practitioner, artist and critic, creator and performer in order to contribute to expanding the field of knowledge surrounding contemporary dance and performance.

Lewis is based in Berlin, Germany as of 2009. She continues her own performance research and is a contributing writer for Berlin Art Link. www.isabellewis.com