Unforeen Dance Workshop
Improvisational approaches to seeing and doing dance
Workshop addressing different strategies for improvisation as a subjective and scenic state of dance. The workshop is conducted by dancer Hugo Leonardo, sharing memories, findings and inventions of his artistic and academic trajectory in contemporary dance, with a special focus on cognitive studies.
Unforeseen Dance is a poetic and physical ability to draw maps in a state of disorientation. It is a game skill. It is a competence for silences that converge in openness to be impressed with one's own body, with the environment and even with the “me” that is impressed.
It is a pilgrim state of dance - full of distances covered - in which I can take out of my backpack memories, findings and inventions that, again and unexpectedly, can generate movement, poetry, something not born.
There are bodily, technical ways of articulating attention, handling emotions, delicacy and risk. We'll go through something there. It's dance and sometimes it doesn't mind being. It is poetic and is often not. It is empty to be full. Or the other way around. Or not.
Dance as a state. Improvisation not as an act, but as an Emotion. In the sense that it is less interesting - if anything - the search for novelty and invention. As an emotion, being in improvisation dance organizes the body as a whole for a certain perceptual relationship with the world. Perception is the act. Improvisation provides the new and vital experience of presence, even if doing the same thing as always.
As we move, we move our attention. But our attention also moves by itself. Which is to say that attention is already movement. It's like that in dance. In fact, it is like this in everything that our bodies get involved, but, with regard to this invitation, we speak of Dance. Undoubtedly, the mismatches between movement and attention are common, mismatches of various kinds which, perhaps, can all be called distractions. And as dancers, we take care to harmonize mismatches! As improvisers we are especially concerned with aligning movement and attention. And we still involve in the game the movement and attention of the other (or others) with whom we dance.
Play the dance game physically, emotionally and poetically with other people and environments to put the living body at risk, in the context of a welcoming, loving, moving practice between euphoria and delicacy. To say that we improvise is to say that we playe this dance game between technique and chaos. And a playful universe of attention opens up at the heart of each dance and in the space-between that we move.
