POETIC MOVEMENT
'Come watch this dance with me'
2 Workshops with
Steve Batts
Dancing is real movement in real time engaged in with poetic intent.
People dance (not "bodies") with presence, space and time.
People are like bells. We are born to be rung.
Let's start with the natural intuition in making complex, layered, meaning in movement and then apply analytical focus to explore, deepen and educate that intuition, before returning to a reliance on the intuition as our guide in composition.
Let's focus on taking armour off.
This workshop will be challenging and interesting... potentially transformative, for anyone with an interest in our movement lives.
Of course that includes people from dance and theatre but it is relevant to music, sports, martial arts, education, therapy...
To join you don't need any specific background or experience, the main criteria are interest and some sort of relevant practice.
The processes are rich and demanding and mostly exploratory and improvisational and each person applies them we go through in their own way.
More info: anna@corpoetica.it
November 10th to 17th 2024
Poetic Movement Basics
Ways of watching ourselves and others. Perspectives.
This workshop is open to anyone with an interest. To join you don't need any specific background or experience. The main criteria are an interest in movement and some sort of relevant practice which might be dance (of any kind), theatre, music, meditation, movement therapy, sport, martial arts or something else. Don't hesitate to ask if you have questions.
The workshop is exploratory and largely improvisational. It gives a practical, conceptual and dispositional foundation in the "poetic movement" approach to dance and dancing. Rather than focusing on a particular idiom or style, this approach goes back to the roots of dancing to rediscover why we might dance in the first place; to rekindle the rich, shamanic, intuitive love for dancing that most people have as children, at the same time as embracing an adult sense of disciplined process and poetic complexity.
The purpose is to enrich the sense of dance as "real movement in real time and real space engaged in with poetic intent" through disciplined improvisatory and exploratory practices that draw attention to presence, time and space.
We will make a "journey" through the movement world that will offer different points of view on the whole landscape. We'll see the dance from the perspective of:
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Phrasing - Surfing time in space through memory and imagination.
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Vertical Space - the compositional aspects of developmental movement
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Proximity - space between is never smooth.
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Intention/tension - effort and action
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Addressing levels - the dance is an invitation to be watched by whom, where or what?
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Directive and Adaptive phases of movement - most of the dance is the indirect consequence of activated desire.
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Compositional dispositions towards space - social space, architecture, weather systems
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Action. Reaction Interaction - patterns of responsiveness
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Major/Minor focus - Where's the attention? How and why does it move?
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Patterns of touch - bridging, sliding, rolling, travelling, expanding/contracting
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The trunk - where we first check for "meaning".
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Limbs - partial patterns and total patterns, gestures point inwards.
Of course, in reality, dancing isn't divisible into presence, time and space but we can favour attention to one parameter for a while so that we can find out more about the whole. We won't be "practising" the elements. Rather we will practice observing the dance from different angles, adding the developing sensitivity to each angle to the whole.
We always begin with the natural intuition in making complex, layered, meaning in movement and then include analytical focus to explore, deepen and educate the intuition, while maintaining faith in the intuition as our guide in the improvisational and compositional process.
February16th to 23rd 2025
Poetic Movement Deepening
What we see. Invitations.
The second workshop is open to people who have previous experience of the "poetic movement" approach, including people who attend the November 2024 workshop. It will deepen the work by focusing on two things:
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Complex relations between parameters. We will revisit each of the perspectives with the experience of the first journey through them. We will look more deeply at the way that the presence, space and time parameters always exist together in the complex, poetic whole. In this way we can become more able to integrate the sensitivity to individual parameters into the whole "gestalt" of the dance.
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Application. Through individual and joint practice, and discussion we will explore the ways that the "poetic movement" approach is relevant to making, performing, collaborating, teaching, pedagogy. In this way we hope to uncover perspectives that can refresh and energise the personal and artistic practice of each participant.
Both workshops involve a lot of watching others and ourselves, and watching ourselves watch, uncovering a clearer experience of how watching, and seeing, people moving with poetic intent affects and changes us. This experience deepens the understanding of what dance is and could be and folds back into, and enriches, the intuitive creative process.
Steve Batts
"I think my concerns as an artist, dancer, teacher and organiser are deeply influenced by particular aspects of my biography"
I'm based in Derry in Northern Ireland. My family moved there from England when I was 12 and I grew up there in the 1970's. It was a turbulent time, with ever present political tension and violence, even in the relatively quiet area that I lived in. I got a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University, but by the time I finished there my life had become devoted to movement and dance. I spent three years in full time study to be a teacher of The Alexander Technique. I've been a certified teacher of that since 1987. I set up Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company with Ursula Laeubli in 1991 and we moved the company to Derry in 1997, near the beginning of a "peace process" that has now been going on for over 25 years. Echo Echo now has it's own studio and theatre spaces. We create and tour performances, participatory projects, classes, artist residencies and festivals. I continue to make and perform solo and group dances and to teach locally and internationally. I have regularly worked with children, older people and people with all sorts of disabilities as well as with professional dancers and performers."
https://www.echoechodance.com/
My concerns are:
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People dance - not bodies. (I want to avoid the tendencies to hyper-objectivisation of the mirrored dance studio and the hyper-subjectivisation of the solipsistic, somatic, bubble).
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A tendency to being poetic in movement is a universal human trait. That's the seed of dancing.
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Dancing is real movement in real space and real time engaged in with poetic intent. It can't be reduced to feeling, sensation, idea or physical function.
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A dance wants to make sense.
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Armour off - not armour on. This is quite scary - and so it should be.
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The compositional sense is intuitive, organic and natural but so is the desire to educate, refine, tune that intuition through disciplined forms of practice
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Being in the moment always involves a deep relationship with past and future - memory and imagination.
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The way that the concept of "inhibition" (non-doing) is used in the Alexander technique continues to inspire me.
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Improvisation and composition are more like two perspectives on any phenomenon rather than two different things to "do".
In my movement practice, as artist and teacher, I explore the way that conceptual and practical analytical processes are embraced by, and influence, the intuitive creative impulse to compose. The intuition suggests analytical processes and welcomes the results of them back into itself. I'm exploring presence, space and time through (among other things) explorations of tonus, effort, addressing levels, disposition, vertical journeys, proximity, meter, pulse, rhythm, phrasing. I think my dancing is more deeply influenced by music and theatre theory and practice than by the theory and practice of concert/art dance.
THE VENUE
THE WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE IN GAIA TERRA, A BEAUTIFUL ECOVILLAGE IN THE NORTH OF ITALY; A PROJECTS CONTAINER, A FORGE OF EXPERIMENTATION TO CREATE ALTERNATIVE POSSIBILITIES TO INHABIT THE LOW-IMPACT PLANET.
GAIA TERRA OFFERS
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INDOOR STUDIO OF 180 SQUARE METERS ENTIRELY BUILT WITH NATURAL MATERIALS
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A BEATIFUL RIVER IMMERSED IN THE WOODS AT 2 MINUTES WALKING DISTANCE FROM THE STUDIO
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BATHROOM AND SHOWER WITH HOT WATER AND BIODEGRADABLE CARE PRODUCTS
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A BIG AND COZY DINING ROOM
32€ PER DAY IS THE CONTRIBUTION FOR:
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ACCOMMODATION
SINGLE BED IN A COMMON SPACE or ECO-CAMPING (TENT OR CAMPER) -
VEGAN FOOD (LOCAL BIOLOGICAL PRODUCTS)
BREAKFAST, LUNCH AND DINNER
WHEN
2 INTESIVE WEEKS OF 6 DAYS
NOVEMBER 10th to 17th 2024
FEBRUARY 16th TO 23rd 2025
6 HOURS A DAY OF SCHEDULED PRACTICE. STUDIO AND OTHER SPACES ALWAYS AVAILABLES FOR SPONTANEUS ACTIVITIES.
ARRIVAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON (first circle together in the evening) AND DEPARTURE ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON (working in the morning until lunch)
TWO ONLINE APPOINTMENTS IN DECEMBER AND JANUARY.
PRICES
THE COST FOR THE ENTIRE PROGRAM IS 370 euros
THE COST FOR A SINGLE WORKSHOP IS 240 euros
ACCOMODATION AND FOOD TO BE PAID SEPARETLY TO GAIA TERRA.
TEAM
THE PROJECT HAS BEEN IMAGINED AND CREATED BY CORPOETICA AND STEVE BATTS FOR Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company.
HOW TO PARTECIPATE
REGISTRATION WILL OPEN ON JUNE 3rd UNTIL AUGUST 3rd, VIA APPLICATION FORM THAT YOU WILL FIND ON THIS PAGE.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE WORKSHOP WILL BE GIVEN IN ENGLISH AND NO TRANSLATION IS PROVIDED BY THE ORGANIZERS.
IN ORDER TO GUARANTEE AN ENVIRONMENT THAT SUPPORTS LEARNING, THERE'S A LIMITED PARTICIPANTS NUMBER. PRIORITY WILL BE GIVEN TO THOSE WHO CAN ATTEND THE ENTIRE PROGRAM.
FOR FURTHER INFO PLEASE CONTACT