Lake Studios Berlin

PULSE and POSSIBILITIES In this improvisation workshop, we will focus on the many facets of listening, and ask what is the shape of it? How can we be in alignment with the energetic fields and frequencies around us? How do we partner our listening as we meet ourselves and others in spaces of vulnerability, contradiction and play? How do we balance the dynamic of knowing with not knowing as we dance? Working with the contraction and expansion of time, we will dive into the musicality of multidimensional experience, weaving different realities and listening to the shifts that take place in points of shared attention.

All the way around : In an intimate concert setting, choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart meets jazz musicians Doug Weiss and Béla Meinberg. Together, they go on an uncharted journey into movement and sound. “All the Way Around” takes the ballad, a song of longing and defiance, and breaks it down into small but meaningful gestures. Tracing and unfurling spirals of memory, “All the way around” opens a door to return our collective experience to the level of the personal. We take a deep dive into what was, riding the waves between the almost-remembered and the unknown.

Choreography and Dance: Meg Stuart | Music: Doug Weiss and Béla Meinberg | Light: Emese Csornai | Artistic Support: Mor Demer

Music For Lectures / Every word was once an animal In this lecture with live music Mette Edvardsen will speak about language and repetition as material in her work. What does it mean to do the same? What does it mean to do something again? ‘Every word was once an animal’ is part of the series ‘Music For Lectures’ by Burrows and Fargion that aims to collide academic practice with the actuality of performance and continues their recent practice of creating often in proximity and collaboration with somebody else’s work.

Text: Mette Edvardsen |  Music:  Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, Francesca Fargion

bromancing and other social dances This workshop will take as its departure point themes touched upon in the piece THE FRATERNITY and will consider different forms of spending time together through dance and other weak forms of presence. Textiles will support the explorations of notions around craft, technique and composition and felt specifically will be an analogy for forms of gathering that are structureless and contingent. We will be working with different scores, phrase material and strategies of camouflage.

In THE FRATERNITY  three women come together in an idle search of suspending time in which dance becomes a smokescreen for an experience that is more like the felt and less like the woven fabric. They offer a texture that one can rest upon a little, that comes with no expectations except for the time that is spent together.

Choreography: Emmilou Rößling | Performance: Emmilou Rößling, Rachell Bo Clark, Tarren Johnson | Light: Maika Knoblich

“But I could never do THAT in a piece!” Choreography as an Active and Receptive Practice Desires and Boundaries, in many different manifestations, are issues i’ve been working/dealing/teaching with for about 10 years now. In this workshop, drawing on that process, and the development of the solo performance Alles Vergängliche, we will consider the Desires that arise while making work. Where do they come from? What do we do with them? Are they friends? Allies? Enemies? Lovers? We will begin by working with each other as mirrors of Desire, then expand our awareness to include our Desires towards our work, and the Universe at large. What role do biography, identity, politics, spirituality, history, society, and so forth, play in our process of creation, and how do we let all of them in, or if we prefer, keep some of them out? This workshop is for anyone who has ever had doubts about their choices while making work.

 Alles Vergängliche In our age of unimaginable transformations at a daily pace, the dancing human body always holds an element of powerlessness. Watching someone flail their arms around on stage is a little weird considering everything else that’s going on. The solo project Alles Vergängliche is an effort by one dancer to swallow the world, by engaging with two other attempts to manifest the universe in a single setting: Gustav Mahler’s 8th symphony, which Mahler himself said is intended to contain everything; and daily newscasts, which choose to include certain stories, and exclude others, to give the supposedly most complete picture possible of what is going on in the world on any given day. That is no more realistic than dancing by one’s self to Mahler, but David draws upon his experience as Musician, Dancer, and Jewish Mystic, and explores what, if any, generative power lives within the human body itself, in the face of an unprecedented daily confrontation with “everything”.

Choreography & Performance: David Bloom | with musical excerpts from: 8th Symphony by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Sir Simon Rattle & the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on EMI Classics. Co-production Tanzfabrik Berlinn Photo © Roberto Duarte

Moving through a memory landscape We’re all probably familiar with the surreal moment when, while dancing, a certain movement transports us back in time, either to a concrete occasion in which we’ve done this already or an undefined feeling of having done it before. In the two years since creating this piece, I’ve further developed an improvisational framework for dealing with memory in movement, based on liminal spaces—the in-between. By entering an inner shadow world/memory landscape, we can move between the past and present. In this in-between space, the usual boundaries of time and concrete actions—beginning, end, & over—are less solid. This allows us to draw from a movement memory reservoir, tapping into what we want from the past, as well as sharpening awareness of the immediate moment. I deal with the nature of memory—both light and heavy—and emotional strategies for memory work. With this framework for moving in liminal space, I feel I can move beyond the confines of linear time.

the memory of yesterday carried me through today How can I remember what I want to remember? A solo work stemming from the desire to hold on to that warm-weather feeling of loving EVERYTHING– and anything. 

Choreography & Performance: Saida Makhmudzade | with support from: HZT / HfS Ernst Busch

Imagined made Tangible The workshop draws upon our connection with intuitive, immediate forms and actions through which we create and relate to the dancing body. The practice is generated from improvisational solo and partnering work, observing states of solitude and company through a lens of immersion. An open-ended approach will direct us towards significant elements; memory / discovery (their guiding power), listening through space and vibration, (in)direct connection with partner/s, mastered-motion at different rates of speed, intimate presence – individually and collectively, radiance of the intangible through the physical. 

Phantom My Love  dives into a nameless-intuitive; where a craving for touch meets a lonely universe of memories. Its world seeks to hold and transcend physical distance; from people we love, have lost and miss. A longing for human touch – through myriad expressions, magnetism between physical bodies or between bodies and non-tangible energies / spaces. The piece unveils tender tensions within presence-absence, weaved in a ritual of desire and longing; held, embraced and surrendered. 

Direction: Maya M. Carroll | With and by: Chiara Marolla, Yeonji Han, Maya M. Carroll | Original Sound and Music: Roy Carroll, Chiara Marolla | Music: Angel Olsen, Antony and the Johnsons

All the time In the workshop we will experiment with different ways of using time, sensing time, and observing time. By using physical scores and techniques as well as imaginary ideas and philosophical concepts, we will try to refind our relationship to the time and to understand what it is that makes each one of us individually feel that we spend our time in the best way. I would like to encourage the participants to question their own “best way” of using and experiencing time and its relativity by proposing different tools that I developed to get more intimate with our sensation of time, be more aware of what is influencing that sensation, and to question if we can detach ourselves from that. 

It’s about time  In our society, as well as in my personal life, we have an idea of what it means to “use time in the best way”. This often means doing more, producing more, working harder and improving in a linear way. But life, I believe, is more of a process then a collection of products. Life happens all the time. It’s not linear and it’s not always going forward, and in life, sometimes “more” can mean different things. This work is dealing with ways of relating to time. from being in the speed of our busy city inviruments to experiencing the slowness of vast and endless nature landscapes.

Dance and Concept: Shai Faran | Music:  Yehezkel Raz

Things to do, together Departing from the research process of CONSUMATION, this workshop proposes a space to explore the power of a common action with its difficulties and satisfactions. We will share different materials from our investigation, create and activate new scores and actions as a group. We will tune into a choreographic doing that insists on bringing attention to the materials we are working with to become sensitive to what they tell us; to their relationships and to everything we know and don’t know about them. We want to suspend the impulse to “solve” and stay together with the problems to let the choreography reveal itself to us as something yet unknown.

CONSUMATION is a performance-ritual of collective cleansing that transforms the daily action of washing hands into an experience of group attention. This performance proposes an intimate space to rediscover the time of the transformation of matter and the transformation of time in a multidirectional space. Which other in-visible ways of being together do we have? What is the potential of the excess? CONSUMATION is part of the research project “The fragility of (in)significant things”, that through a series of choreographic and performative studies, explores the relation between bodies and things in the context of diminishing planetary resources.

Performance by and with: Ana Laura Lozza and Bárbara Hang | Dramaturgical Advice: María Jerez, Janaina Carrer, Rosa Casado

Dance of the being The research is founded on body presence, shared movement, and spoken language examining and generating spaces of intersubjectivity, through which the boundary between the self and the other is blurred. Using embodied movement practices & including the perception of others, the work involves participants in a subtle space of listening, working with attention and intersubjectivity, towards inclusion. The workshop is a space where non-human animals and human animals could come together in a shared and co-habitated embodiment of knowledge and exchange. Specifically: dogs and their owners and everyone that is interested to work with nonhumans can participate.

DOGOD. The Situation Barbara Berti begins the creation process with an audition for dogs. Together with Rocio Marano, Marco Mazzoni, the performance brings the human animal and the non-human animal together in a safe environment that contemplates different perceptions. Ideas of fun, play, and fighting induce participants to navigate instantaneous and interactive choreographic flows. The performers map and structure the space both through intimate acts of presence and the positioning of objects; blurring the boundary between animate and inanimate and continuously deconstructing the ‘situation’. The Situation draws on Donna Haraway’s suggestion to rethink the relationship between species and to “be able to join another, to see together without pretending to be another”. It assumes the unpredictable and insecure threshold in which the continuous construction and destruction of a place is both relational and empathetic. Within it, physicality is a radar, a language to communicate spatially. An expression of the territory and not of identity. 

Concept: Barbara Berti | Performers and collaboration: Rocio Marano, Paulo Rosini, Barbara Berti, Rudi-Pistacchio, Boki | Objects: Marco Mazzoni

Thinking the hair In this workshop, We will think the hair, we will observe our flesh and we will move our bodies. We will review texts and objects I use for the creation of the work and my own relationship with hair, to open up the conversation about the subject. We will focuses on the interaction of hair and the body exploring soma?c and highly physical quality of movement. We will use our imaginary to create small dances with and about hair. I aim to discover some of the beautiful, the playful, the comical or even dramatic possibilities to generate discourses about hair.

In  La postal de nuestra existencia  In an intimate exploration, Areli Moran examines the significance of hair as a repository of social norms, identity and desire. Why is head hair associated with beauty and seduction in most societies, while body hair is perceived as repulsive? While Moran used to find her own hair disgusting, today a playful curiosity prevails. Between gentleness and electrifying tension, she exposes herself to a relentless confrontation with her own body.

Concept, choreography & performance: Areli Moran |  Sound design: Rodrigo Zárate Marfil, Areli Moran | Producción assistant: Nika Nardelli | Dramaturgy: Alex Hennig | Poem: Julia Piastro | Scenography & Costume: Hiram Kat , Daniel Luis, Jose Olivares | Light: Susana Alonso