Hannah Juliane Steenbeck & Achraf Lansari  – House Dance Residency

Our residency is digging into House dance, focusing on its footwork, grooves, and musicality. We’ll zoom in on key elements and explore how they connect with movement principles from popping, breaking, and contemporary dance. We analyze how the body reacts to these specific movements, finding common threads and new possibilities. By working through session labs and collective research, taking in our experiences we aim to create new material and inspire new perspectives.

Residency blog posts

January 16, 2025

house dance residency // gaps and connections

Part 1 House Dance Concepts

Coming from various movement backgrounds, but sharing a love for house dance, music, and culture we started the residency to curiously explore from there. Inspired by the music we played around with oscillation and freestyle concepts and found a lot of doors to open (with another thousand doors behind each of them). We broke down known house dance steps to their essential elements, which led us to understand new ways of connecting them. This opened up an even bigger playground again. 
Throughout this very creative month, we found ourselves always coming back and revisiting two topics: – How can we explore the gaps that we encounter? (This might be the gap between hearing a sound and translating it into movement, the gap between two beats, the space between two bodies, etc.) How can we create gaps where things seem to be glued together by infusing time and/or space?- How can we create connections? (This might be bridges across those gaps or between entities that seem to be independent at first sight)

Part 2  Kinect Visual Art

How to use a different medium to enrich the movement for instance “Jacking”? How can the gap between the music mind and soul be represented?

Part 3 Stalking analysis & evolution

A big part of our research is based on a concept called “stalking”, a kind of improvisational score within house dance with the aim to connect to each other, to share and mark the space in strong connection with the music. We explored less usual forms within this concept; like playing with uneven counts, variations in the movement’s amplitude and by connecting through touch as well.

Part 4  Hear & Now + Shared practice 

As house dance is also strongly defined by clubbing and collective experiences it was very helpful for us to be able to share our explorations within bigger group settings. Throughout the month we were moving back and forth between lake studios and Berlin, where we were teaching Breaking and House dance as well as DJing (Achraf) and dancing at various events. These experiences informed our ongoing research and vice versa. Another beautiful possibility to let the research pass through other bodies was within the shared practice and the “Hear and now”* session featuring “beyond our house”. It was very enriching to see other artists dealing with some of the ideas that we could bring to the space. 

Part 5 Choreographic concepts 

Towards the end of the residency, we used two days for creating two short solos including and combining some of the research’s concepts.