Can we ever truly dance freely when someone else is watching? As performers, do we not immediately feel obligated ‘to perform’ when audiences are present? As choreographers, do we not automatically ‘use’ and ‘reduce’ our performers to objects and colours – in our attempt to create our visions and images? Is there a different way? Can a performer exist as a human being on stage – with all of our uncertainties, contradictions, self-doubt and undefined thoughts? Can a performative space, where humans (performers) are meeting other humans (audiences), create a different logic for art? One that relies on full subjectivity as a tool for expression, rather than predefined images and frames?
The main goal of this workshop is to cultivate awareness. To not simply perform a performance mindlessly, to not take for granted the relations between performers and choreographers or ignore the pre-conceptions of audiences witnessing a performance, but to constantly be aware of who you are, as a performer, in every moment, and to sometimes – even in the middle of it all – self-reflect, re-construct, re-create, re-choose.
The workshop proposes a new logic of creating dance using Livne's ‘Spirit Dance’ method to let the intuition, chance, real inner process, complex humanity, chaotic sexuality, aesthetic confrontations, independent thoughts, trippy imaginative visions, exist while someone else is watching you!
The practice and the theory that will be shared during this workshop will open new directions of thinking about choreography and its relation to real processes of human beings, and how to truly perceive the dancers as full subjects that are changing with time, and not as mere objects ‘used’ by a choreographer to create ‘images’. How can this change in perception affect the performative event’s logic and appearance and expand the performative medium?
This workshop is open to dancers, choreographers and performers of all genders, ages and experience.
Lilach Pnina Livne