Tarot Technique
a danced meditation

Dance can be a tool to dive into our subconsciousness, to discover female and masculine energies in our bodies, to decide if you must take action or you must go with the flow, and how much you can rely on the powers inside (as sexuality and creativity) and around you (belief in your possible position in society).

This description about dance could also refer to the tarot, an old divination system, using play-cards with symbolic figures. The tarot appeared in europe around the middle ages. Every single card invite you to reconsider how you function in your mind and body, and how you position yourself in society.

Every card can be explored by dancing it. By moving our bodies in a certain way, influenced by our imagination, influenced by the card, we can understand the depth of the card in connection with who we can be at that moment. We could dance a card as a daily practice, as a moment to ourselves to contemplate, a danced meditation.
But before we can do this, we must learn how to connect the different energies of the cards with our movements, and we must understand the spiritual development symbolised by the different cards. In the workshop we will study the major arcana of the tarot- the 22 cards with symbolic figures starting with the fool, and at the end a naked woman, representing a new world, in the reconstructed illustrations of the Tarot de Marseille by Camoin and Jodorowsky. We will try to make them our own in our minds, bodies, and in our dance. A certain knowledge of English is necessary to follow the course.



Robert Steijn
Robert Steijn tries to bring the magic back in life and in the theatre. His instrument is his body and his mind. He thinks we must clean this instrument, before we can offer the audience something valuable. Although he grew up as a disco kid, and discovered trance-states during the house music in the eighties and nineties, he started late dancing in front of an audience. His helper is a deer, who appears in a lot of his texts and dances. His belief is that everyone can become a home made contemporary shaman, if he puts himself on the path of poetry. In making dance performances he feels influenced by two dutch choreographers with whom he worked for more than ten years as a dramaturge: Gonnie Heggen and Desiree Delauney. He is also influenced by two theatre companies, belonging to the dutch avantgarde: called Nieuw West and Maatschappij Discordia. In inventing big rituals, as he used to do sometimes, he is influenced by his collaboration with the Dutch director Lidy Six. In his thinking about art, he is strongly influenced by the mentality of the work of performance artists Jack Smith, and the poets Whalt Whitman and Alan Ginsberg. In his aesthetics he is influenced by the formality and playfullness of the performances of Dan Graham and Matt Mullican. In his belief in the spiritual dimension of theatre he is influenced by his encounters with the Korean Shaman Hi ah Park, by Ayahuasca rituals, long walks and very significant dreams and visions about how to go on in his life.