Workshops 2023

Workshops 2023

© Isabel Lewis, Inner Strip (2014)

Isabel Lewis
Unambitious Stripper

© Isabel Lewis, Inner Strip (2014)
Adv
Intensive 3, 29.7.+30.7.2023
11:00–17:00
Schmelz 7

Departing from feminist sociologist Roslyn Wallach Bologh's notion of "erotic sociability" as a form of interhuman sociality as an alternative to the dominant 20th century relational modes of competition, conflict, and coercion, this workshop will focus on the tuning and heightening of the senses in order to facilitate a state of hyper-presence that will be the aid towards generative and affective forms of being and dancing together in heterotopic space. The figure of the unambitious stripper serves as a guide to connecting with our inner worlds in order to become more radically receptive to our outer worlds. For Lewis “unambitiousness” is key to the notion of the unambitious stripper. The outward-oriented gaze that reaches out to address and arrest the client with the ambition of monetary gain is turned in on itself in this scenario. Here the strip dancer turns their gaze inward, initially away from the paying customer and into their immediate kinesphere, toward the surface of their own skin, through the epidermis and into their fleshy, wet innards. The Unambitious Stripper uses imagination combined with physicality to sensually strip away these bodily layers and approach presence and energetic states in order to ultimately reconnect with the human and nonhuman presences they share space with. The dance that emerges is processual, a double motion of inner and outer, a becoming and an undoing, a movement on a continuum of becoming an object of interest and desire and being drawn out as an interested and desiring subject.

Continuing her trajectory at ImPulsTanz of workshops as artistic proposals, Lewis continues her research with Unambitious Stripper. This workshop will incorporate elements of her past workshops such as her research on agentic capacities within collective creative efforts from Communal EPIC Fiction (2011) and research from Ballistic Body (2012) on the development of a technique Lewis calls “epidermal dancing”, dancing from the surfaces of both our biological skin and the choreographic “skin” we inhabit as habitus – our systems of embodied dispositions and tendencies that organise the ways we perceive the social world around us and how we react to it. Unambitious Stripper will put acute focus on all the senses including the olfactory with smells by renowned smell researcher Sissel Tolaas.

Isabel Lewis
© Isabel Lewis, Inner Strip (2014)
© Jason Akira Somma
© ImPulsTanz - All rights reserved
Date: 29.03.2024, 00:47 | Link: https://www.impulstanz.com/en/workshops/pid4973/