Tilburg Workshop

The third workshop week took place in Tilburg with choreographer Roberta Racis and dance dramaturg Nina Aalders from Friday 26 October – Thursday 1 November. 

Every day the 11 young dancers worked from 10-18 h in the DansBrabant–studio in Theater De Nieuwe Vorst in Tilburg.

The title of the workshop was “Love Rituals” and the focus was on somatic practices that seek to embody pure joy via the physical body. Through individual and group work the participants together with the dancemaker and the dance dramaturg explored the potential within the physicality of their bodies. Exercises and phrases using leaps, lines and spirals attempted to deconstruct conventions we hold about dance and beauty and to build a collective rite where the group moving together becomes a swirling, vital organism which flows into space as a queer, resilient and sensual community.

“From a conceptual point of view, I am interested in the possibility of arriving through a performative practice to a body and to an organism of bodies which, through a complex score perform a transfiguration in which gender is no longer perceived, a collective transformation capable of evoking freedom, joy, desire and change”. 

Roberta Racis

According to Nina, together they worked on finding pleasure in relationships. In relationship to the materials, the techniques that they put forward. And in relationship to each other. The ritual that they would like to build aimed to invite the audience to lose conventions that we have about dance and beauty.

On the last day, 1st November, a presentation was held in the evening including an after-talk with the audience in the big venue in Theater De Nieuwe Vorst.

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