VOICES Festival, November 2-3, 2024, Villa Elisabeth

Production: Site Art Projects
Supported by: AFF Projects

with
Asya Ashman
Tanya Chizhikova & Maya Selezneva
Ekaterina Kaliuzhnaia
Veronica Tikhonova
Katya Volkova

In addition to the performance program Voices Festival offers a selection of workshops that introduce practices by another six dance artists. Open level classes are designed to be an alternative way to meet artists, to hear their artistic voices, to look into the issues they care for and experience some of their working tools. Ekaterina Kaliuzhnaia invites to explore deep somatic woods. Tanya Chizhikova and Maya Selezneva propose to practice mutual care while moving. Asya Ashman plays with switching roles at her family workshop. Veronica Tikhonova creates space for collective fantasies of hyper reality, while Katya Volkova galvanize the group work into communal act of empowerment and expression.

This workshop is a part of ongoing research for a new duet piece on care and intensity. We invite participants to experience the groove of tenderness, the empowerment through giving care to others and receiving it, the dynamics of support in movement. Through these two days we will unfold basics of gentle partnering and explore how to keep gentleness of touch and connection, even as the body engages in more extreme physical demands, where speed, strength, effort, and a strong sense of direction dominate the movement. We will practice techniques that help sustain this tenderness, such as mindful awareness of the connection, using focus to maintain softness, and finding ways to rest within the act of carrying. Through these practices, we will learn to balance exertion with care, allowing us to stay connected without becoming exhausted, offering rest and support to ourselves and others.

In the wilderness every movement appears from the deeper instinct and from the deep listening to the forest. What if we could dance this way? What if we could embody this deep forest feeling in our dance? This workshop is inspired by somatic techniques, practice of authentic movement and artistic research. We will actively move our muscles, bones, ligaments, listening to our breathing and bodily sensations. Together we will explore intensity, depth and lightness as qualities for movement. We will observe how the words and images of depth influence our dance improvisation: deep woods, deep roots, deep listening, deep calm, deep state of mind, deep down in my being, deep movement.

The workshop is an insight into artistic practice that is rooted in post-Internet philosophy and examines the blurry lines between reality and simulation in the current digital age. Participants are invited to collectively explore hyperreal interactions and to embody virtual body qualities—such as gameplay, weightlessness, lack of inertia and gravity, and the concept of rebirth. Each of us will create a personal movement vocabulary inspired by gestures and emojis, treating these movements like elements in music production: cutting, fading in and out, and looping them. The aim is to develop a quality of an unfinished movement, a movement that does not serve a functional purpose, glitching between being and not-being. With these qualities, we will delve into the creation of a collective reality, searching for new ways to communicate and exploring the boundaries of social interaction.

Join us for an immersive movement workshop where the body becomes space for amplified voice and manifesting collective energy. In this dynamic experience movement will be transformed into a powerful language of communication. Through a playful and joyful journey, we will create a living landscape of expression, where individual and collective voices emerge through spontaneous choreography and rhythmic patterns. Contemporary electronic sound will be our guide, a trusted companion that enhances our exploration of rhythms and ritualization. Through this process, we'll craft unique bodily expressions and collectively develop choreographic codes, culminating in a collaborative score for a final, improvisational performance playground. This workshop is an invitation to awaken social awareness, connect deeply with others, and celebrate the power of movement as a means of communication and expression.

This is a family workshop where parents and children can experiment, observe, share fun moments, and get to know each other better. They will have the chance to switch roles with one another, playing with the hierarchy of following and the hierarchy of giving tasks in movement. As we twist and soften these hierarchies, families will practice attentive observation and verbalizing what they see. By exploring new ways of communication through movement, each family will create their own collaborative dance, which can be performed and further developed even after the workshop is finished.