MORNING MOVEMENT PRACTICE
FULLY PRESENT:
PLEASURE AND ENERGY TRANSMISSION
WITH VALERIE RENAY
Pleasure is the key to this playful and energising body work with focused energy, rooted in the opening of the senses and inspired by the Body Weather M/B training (M for mind & muscles - B for Body & Bones). This training is combined with a physical exploration of voice production, developing breathing technique and using the whole body as a resonance chamber to increase vocal range and find new qualities, textures and approaches to using voice. Together, we will research ways of being fully present with body and voice with minimum effort for maximum impact, we will sweat and scream, laugh and cry on the way! This training uses the trajectory of the orgasm arch, the concept of the universal pulse as a subtext towards stylised and hyper-real physical and vocal expression. A study of the whole range of human vibrations leading to freedom of creativity. Performance as a ritualistic experience.
Body Weather - an energetic, dynamic and rhythmic movement work-out developing strength, endurance, flexibility and grounding as well as sensitivity, co-ordination and body awareness.
VALERIE RENAY BIO
Valerie Renay is a French Caribbean performer, director, contemporary and electronic pop chanteuse, musician, vocal and acting coach, painter, DJ, and healer based in Berlin since 2006.
Ever present on the international alternative scene as a versatile artist, her performance work and music are concerned with notions of identity, our place in society, our spiritual quest and everyday psychosis. Questions, often confrontational, are asked in a brutal, stylised dreamlike reality. Her vision is raw yet carefully choreographed, holding the emotional body at its core. Her performance, music and teaching are best described as empowering, visceral, and sensual and have taken her to South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Georgia, Romania, UK and everywhere in Europe. Valerie’s training masters include Phillippe Gaulier, Yoshi Oida, and Derevo. Her physicality is inspired by contact improv, release tech and Body Weather.
Website 1
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AFTERNOON THEMATIC WORKSHOP
WHAT DOES THIS BODY MAKE?
(BODY BASED THEORY PRACTICE*)
WITH SHANNON STEWART
BACKGROUND: How does the material of who I am, intersect with the material of who you are, the material that has made us, the matter that makes the world, and the magic that goes beyond matter? How is this with me as I make, intrinsic to what I make, but not inevitably defining what I make? [Understanding that “I” is not a static and known or completely knowable thing].
WDTBM is a research module that I have facilitated for 6 years putting gender and queer theory into practice--or--rather doing the practices we do as dance/movement/somatic people and understanding their intersection with theories about how we come to embody our bodies. Theory can come from a book, from a conversation, from an experience. Theory can simply be the proposal to put your attention in a particular place as you do any action and see what happens. After the year of loss and isolation we’ve had, with the momentous surge in consciousness of racial inequity, with dance institutions crumbling and being reimagined, with the art market suddenly losing its power, I still ask the same question - WHAT DOES/IS/CAN/WILL this body make? The dancing body is not an abstracted vessel to be filled with meaning from content put upon us. She/he/they have always been the other part of the content giving meaning and shape and agreeing to or disrupting contexts. How do we do justice that as part of doing work for equity and justice more broadly? Can we apply poetics and create subtle interventions? Can we sense the surfaces and soften the edges? Who gets to?
From this place, “What Does This Body Make?” provides individual research in a collective learning environment where each participant grapples with performance, identity, perception and context while considering what it means to work as an artist in the unresolvable landscape of privilege, oppression, ego, art markets, ecological crisis and layered corporeality. We look at gender and race identities, internalized systems of oppression, theories from philosophy and ecology, and create practices of disruption.
Our in person time will serve as a beginning, an introduction, a chance to witness ourselves as artists always in the process of making. In our online week, the final week of the program, we will share publicly our performances/practices/manifestations so that we can then start again. Our sessions combine somatic exercises adapted to engage questions about how we construct our bodies and how they are constructed. Proposals are seeded from queer, feminist, critical race theory, and each other that exemplify and disrupt the way identity is embodied. We focus attention to the pressure spaces exert, the surfaces that we are reflecting off of, the relationship of subject/object, as well as the act of relating. We explore the process of orientation and disorientation, saying yes to our patterns and then stepping back to read what our bodies are making through a variety of lenses. We will use tools/actions/scores that are familiar but slightly re-configured to look for rifts, illegible or unfamiliar spaces.
*MORE ON BODY BASED THEORY PRACTICE
Critical theorists from many disciplines propose that we formulate our identities through repeated quotations, embodied gestures and acts that circulate and reinforce one another. These things are understood as individual but enacted collectively and reinforce interlocking systems and modes of being that further systems of domination, exploitation and violence but also (maybe more hopefully) forms of resistance, disruption, reimagining. BODY BASED THEORY PRACTICE is an open source term for situating somatic practices, dance rituals, body-based exercises in the context of feminist, queer, critical race, and crip theory. As a dance artist it is interesting to conceive and reconceive of bodily conditioning and training and discrepancies between conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, complicit and coerced. This learned “repertoire of life” is part of everyday existence but is also the very practice of dance - repeated bodily motions, repeated hierarchies, repeated and reinforced trajectories. Queer theorists and gender theorists suggest ways in which we can reorient or subvert our embodied inclinations. Is/can dance be a hopeful intervention in the space between conscious and unconscious? And in what form? A workshop? A forum? A Performance? A protest? More info and a full article on BBTP is found on my website.
SHANNON STEWART BIO
Shannon Stewart is an artist based in New Orleans with the experience of many different places shaping her sense of home. She works as a movement teacher/therapist, choreographer, and curator. Shannon has shared her performance work at DOCK 11 (Berlin), Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards (Seattle), RISK/REWARD, Performance Works Northwest (Portland), Philadelphia Dance Projects, the Hinterlands (Detroit), Definitive Figures Festival, Marigny Opera House, Tulane University (New Orleans), Bryant Lake Bowl, Cowles Center (Minneapolis), the Work Room (Atlanta), Pivot Arts Incubator (Chicago), Future Oceans (NYC), Good Children Gallery, the Front Gallery (New Orleans) and has been invited to the V&A Late in London and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Her collaborative film work has screened at film festivals big and small. As a performer and collaborator, Shannon has worked with Aurora Nealand, Deborah Hay, Christopher Matthews, tEEth performance, zoe | juniper, Dayna Hanson, Pat Graney, Kathleen Hermesdorf, and many others. The only way that she has survived any of this is because of the people who have invited her, trusted her, schooled her, forgiven her, and pushed her forward.
Photography: Diogo DeLima, Lauren Hind, Ian Douglas