Painting with the Performative Pallette

As dancers today, we are familiarized with countless distinct approaches to movement generation. As well, there is an “everything is possible” (art)context within which we need to position our live performance art. On stage and in the creative process, todays values tend to be fluid, and relevance is often unstable: as creators of our own reality, we're faced with endless shifting between performative approaches, languages, genres, styles and performance value systems.

What do we choose, How and When? Do we want to be able to choose at all? How do we train moving consciously between these value systems?

A variety of 21st century performance interests: Presence-ing, focusing, perceiving, generating, articulating, listening, processing, interpreting, saying and responding. Moving between and eventually linking familiar performative strategies for the sake of a new comfortability with dissimilar genres occupying the same body.

Imported into a new format are Jack's history with Performative Speech Act Theory (2009-13) and Eline's actuel experience with “RADAR”, a highly successful experiment in the impact of sound on the body, leading to an understanding about how different ways of listening create clear movement qualities: how changing perspective changes the performative instrument.

In the work sessions, play is as important as work. We need to exercise our performers instrument in order to access, utilize and compare our intrinsic knowledges and their systems. The body is resonates with multiple systems for creating meaning. (associations, memories, familiar languages> these can be conscious, these can be unwanted, unplanned, unwarranted)

How do you want to play with meaning makers? What are we forgetting?

The  exercises that are designed for Building Skills:

• generating and moving between these varieties of performative options

• moving through different registers in the body

• instinct, sub-conscious, symbolic, linguistic, theatrical, and abstract dance languages.

• movement generation based on the breath and the presence without content or context.

• explore the impact of speech acts (from you from us)

•  add listening options (internal and external, task oriented focus)

• examine and manipulate the performance genres/approaches of the abstract and the

• theatrical and the value of their combination.
• expose together the intrinsic motivations, and support what works for you.