Poetic Intro: Dancing appears to me as the centrepiece to hold the holes together, a place where it is easier to accept another and cultivate curiosity for the possible physical and metaphysical shapes. Dance is awesome, a state of awe, where we can hold the complexity of our identities, yet dissolve or blur into a raw aliveness. Dancing allows for both discomfort and joy, the sweet spot between grievance and celebration. As a personal and collective energetic hygiene project, dancing can be a powerful medicine, giving permission to sift through our impulses, historical and daily absorptions and impacts, to press out what we swallowed, yet, where is it appropriate to make unorthodox shapes perceptual sorceries heretic playgrounds of the monstrous between subconscious suppression desire to un-become and digest the head with the rest of the body spilling imploding to acknowledge the miracle of another living being and accept our own distortion for they are what we are, dancing as politics of loss, a fugitive state, a prayer, just being, not alone not alone not alone, to get around to love tenderness and again and again loosing syntax making meaning?
What’s the practice: Born digital during pandemic and re-adapted to analogue, Influencer Dance is a hybrid between Authentic Movement practice and dance-play with an attitude, dispelling influencer culture, in favor of IRL mutual with-nessing. The session is made of a warm-up centring a movement principle, a system or an image to get us started in our felt sense, supporting the access to movement, followed by an alternating between dancing with eyes closed or open and witnessing with direct or indirect looking, close or afar. It is done in pairs. This practice widens the habits of witnessing. De-prioritising the visual, we get to practise to witness kinesthetically, vibing, echoing and ultimately addressing each other directly. The witness is under the influence of a dance. The dancer is unconditionally accepted. Dance is acknowledged as an energy that shapes us, unbecoming authors to become hosts of a dance. We close with a brief verbal or written reflection to integrate.
The class is accessible to any moving body, with or without dance training experience.
This workshop is assisted by Auro Orso.
Auro Orso is a Berlin based dancer, choreographer, performer and activist who identifies as Trans and Two-Spirit. He has presented his work in many different venues in Berlin such as Dock11, HAU, Sophiensäle, Ballhaus Naunynstraße and performed in several other countries around the globe. His art is inevitably linked to his lived experience as a racialised person and his political activism and tunes into Indigenous knowledge and world-views.
His artistic research includes exploring decolonising practices in all aspects of life as well as questioning the Western/colonial ilusion of universality, binaries and “the apropiate“.
In his workshops and performances movement material can be informed by somatics, perreo, consent and physical theatre.
His performances include a spectrum of topics along care, Indigenous futurism and imaginative gender-riots. Reclaiming/remembering/redoing/relearning as well as gentleness, humor and political pleasure are omnipresent in his sharings.
