Isabelle Schad
Experience #0

Experience #0 When the body and its materiality is becoming the work itself and the work itself becomes experience and process, the question of working principles becomes a place of complex interdependencies between the making of work and the mechanisms of production. This place, where the pertinence in re-inventing ourselves, the others, our common practices and re-considering the finished through putting the emphasis on continuous learning processes, gets challenged. In Experience #0, I would like to share with you my current research on and around the body and its movements, the motivations and origins of moving, dancing, being there in present time and how this can relate to music, sounding, vocalising, breathing, being there again... Comparing musical terminology and concepts with physiology, choreographic writing and compositional elements in dance, we will look into the relationships between visual and auditory rhythms, between musical terms and organisations of bodies writing themselves in space like motifs, figures, polyphonic voices or body - landscapes. A space between texture and form, seeing and hearing, perception and state, vibration and composition, forgetting and discovering, pleasure of dance and pleasure of music. Also a space or place where the notion of creation becomes somewhat relative to the learning process that we share. Yet making choreography / writing dance will be our aim. Our learning process will be based upon practice, body practice, in which we are studying complex physiological processes (like embryology) that make us reflect upon space, environment, relationship, self, other in so many ways; an inside not an outside learning. How can experience make us understand or learn anew? See anew? In order to forget the images that we know already, we need to find new images, but then those new images can become again "fixed" images that we need to forget, so that we can learn again, see again. In order to reconsider form we need to look into what in-forms the form. We will look into the process of choreographing as the becoming of (re)presentation. When the understanding of the moving body is based on both experience and process and such processes become choreography, then the choreography is based on experience and working process as well. If the choreography is based on score-writing like a partition in music - the body is becoming then the music, the voice. And the score gives indications to re-find the experience and the process again and anew in present time to become presentation. Along the way, within a creative process, the writing of a score gets enriched, becomes more and more complex and precise, in relation to (inner/outer) space, initiation of movement, rhythm (time), intensity etc. We will work with scores that I wrote within my current project "Musik (Praticable)" and make new scores during the workshop - scores that serve as a timeline and consist of drawings and text. We will enhance the text along the way in the process, make notes and write about our own/new/different perceptions of inner/outer space, our body experiences, our strategies, the impact and influences we get from our environment. We will be dealing with organisation of materials, of bodies in space and time. Little by little, the scores will get more like a piece of writing itself, which has its own logic, almost like a poem, from which everyone can nourish her/himself in her/his own way. And therefore the dancing of the scores/becoming piece will be rather a meditation upon the score, which serves us to be there in present time whilst meeting an audience. We will be audiences for each other, whilst working in smaller groups. An audience is feeding back the performer in her/his activity, which again will feed back the score, that could get re-written again after this experience and so on. Ideally practising thus continues in the duration of a presentation in front of an audience, a crucial element to understand in the making of work. What/Who moves while seeing? (A public showing of our work might be interesting towards the end of the week... in order to meet a larger audience...) Which words could describe those bodies and (body) images that emerge if those bodies and images are beyond what we know already, that is beyond what we recognise as known images; beyond dance style, narratives, signs or representation? Could the movement itself be the meaning? The body as the meaning and the body as the medium. Finally we will be reflecting upon the relationships between the how and the what, and why our ways of working are reflected in what gets produced. The mechanisms of production are the very place of all the contradictions existing in making work and presenting it, where related notions like open space, practice orientated work, process vs product, networking, collaboration, authorship start to (sometimes dangerously) intermingle. How could we avoid the working for (somebody) and transform it into a working with (each other), and therefore imagine a real meeting? We are dealing with modalities of working and thinking, and with their effects on (re)presentation. Isabelle Schad is a choreographer and performer; she lives in Berlin and works in many places. After having studied classical ballet in Stuttgart, she has danced in various classical companies and extended her dance education, looking for different kinds of information taking workshops, receiving scholarships (like danceWEB a.o.) and in the last years, orientating herself more and more towards somatic practices like Body-Mind Centering (e.g. the Embryology Workshop with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in 2010 has become an outstanding mark in her experiences). She has performed with diverse companies and choreographers like Ultima Vez / Wim Vandekeybus, Frédéric Gies, Olga Mesa, Eszter Salamon a.o. Since 1999, she is developing her own work that is strongly based on body practices / research and continuous learning processes towards (re)presentation. Her pieces (like California Roll or Still Lives - a community project that has been developed in over 12 european cities) are presented internationally; she received several nominations, prizes and working residencies (like at Podewil Berlin or de Monty in Antwerpen a.o.). In the last years, she has been co-initiating several projects/groups that are searching for ways of organising, possibilities of functioning and exploring different ways of working together, bringing in relation the different fields of research and practices between the artists involved and questioning modes of production. With Bruno Pocheron and Ben Anderson she has initiated "Good Work" in 2003, a collaborative framework concerned with the (re)presentation, and perception of the body onstage and in society. Good Work resulted in performances involving artists such as Martin Bélanger, Nuno Bizarro, Frédéric Gies, Hanna Hedman, Olivier Heinry, Benoît Lachambre and Manuel Pelmus. In 2005 Alice Chauchat, Frédéric Gies, Frédéric de Carlo, Odile Seitz and herself initiated the open collective "Praticable" proposing a specific model of working together between artists in the field of dance and choreography: based on the sharing of body practices, "Praticable" brings together research, learning processes, creation, production and distribution, multiplying circulations between them. Another recent experience of making works together is the series of pieces: "Unturtled(s)" (from 2009 ongoing) realized with the visual artist Laurent Goldring, in which they reverse the relationship between image and body, getting rid of resemblances between both, changing the relation between inner and outer space, to (re)question the whole notion of representation (again). Her current series of group pieces "Musik (Praticable)" that she has started in Zagreb and in Berlin, is comparing musical terminology and concepts with physiology, choreographic writing and compositional elements in dance: organisations of bodies writing themselves in space like motifs, figures, polyphonic voices or body - landscapes. Since quite some years, she is teaching - as a way to continue learning and working, sharing knowledge, ideas and practices, e.g. in Berlin at the MA Choreography and BA (HZT) or internationally in the frame of workshops or short period projects. furhter information: www.isabelle-schad.net www.praticable.info