The classes and choreography workshops follow the same direction as the choreographic approach but they are more specifically organized around the dancers, carefully respecting differences, according to everyone’s culture, history, imagination and talent.
The workshops are organized around two big axes:
1. The technical classes (1,5 – 2 hours)
Mix of yoga, classical technique, rhythm, space and strength, permanent game between equilibrium and disequilibrium of forces:
– oppositions, alternations, compensations
– work of position, weight consciousness, usage of the floor, of speed, the suppleness of the back
– choreographic exercises and variations on equilibria and disequilibria, vertigo, spirals, deformation, outburst, precision, elements which will constitute points of attention in the choreography workshop as well.
Space becomes a partner the dancer moves with.
2. Choreography workshop (3 – 5 hours)
In our body, elements have been deposited; they come from our diverse experiences, from sensations, from what we have heard, looked at, touched, tasted.
This second axis is a place of concentration where the physical test melts with the imagination.
The goal is to play with oneself, through different kinds of support: texts, photographs, paintings, events, action verbs, forms, colours, materials,… and like a singular acrobat, in a playful mood, to construct atmospheres or choreographic phrases.
Improvisations and constructions alternate between the theatrical and the formal, the banal and the stylized, the simple and the complicated, extravagance and sobriety, the great and the small, emotion and cool.
It is first and foremost an individual work, a fundamental experience in the process of creation. Only the body that is committed to the work can feel the precision and the exactness of a gesture, the evidence of a space, the derivation, drift, error.
In all these exercises it is as important to learn to look as it is to perform.
To maintain an equilibrium between structures and risk-taking, to accept the clumsiness and the evasions, while keeping the mood playful, during the improvisation sessions that are most free, liberated, spontaneous, instinctive and collective.
To push a movement beyond the equilibrium is to provoke the disequilibrium, to enter into the collapse and, in order to avoid the collapse, we advance. This is as valuable for physical movement as it is for feelings.