PRACTICABLE 3_Open call: ‘The Dance of Companionship’ with Alice Chauchat

The Dance of Companionship, workshop for professional dancers with Alice Chauchat

The Dance of Companionship (2014) is a guided dance framed by a spoken text and involving the writing of poems. The text weaves together propositions for dance and narrative fragments about forms of togetherness. It is a practice of being-with: with dance, with oneself, with each other, in attentive and intimate distance. As we focus with ever more detail on the present events, dance – our companion – continuously moves away as that which exceeds the dancer’s own doings. It is a horizon: a partner that remains unknown, whose unknowability obliges and displaces.

The Dance of Companionship is part of the collection of dance scores that feed Alice’s Togethering project. About an hour long, it is at once a performance, a class and a practice of being together. In this intensive workshop, Alice offers to pass on its guidance, both as performance and as teaching. As in any repertoire situation, the adaptation of the role will demand that each participant articulate the imaginary, language and dance knowledge which allow them to adapt the score.

Alice Chauchat, based in Berlin, works as a choreographer, dancer, assistant, teacher, mentor, etc. Collaboration (and thereby the negotiation of distance, otherness, decentring, etc.) has been a recurring reality and a growing concern in her work. This ongoing research produces a collection of scores, choreographic concepts and performances. It takes place in dance studios, on stage, in urban space and in text form. Her interest in ways of sharing situations, artistic responsibility or means of production and discursive tools led her to participate in setting up the open collective Praticable, developing the everybody’s internet-based active archive project, or the PerformingArtsForum in Saint-Erme, France. 2010-12, she co-directed Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an artistic research centre in the suburbs of Paris. 2013-16, she facilitated the Teachback programme for dance and pedagogy research with Jennifer Lacey at ImpulsTanz Vienna. Alice teaches for many educational programmes in Europe, institutional and self-run.

Practical information
Date: March 10th-14th (five days in a row)
Schedule: 11 am to 17 pm
Place: Sala Ricson, Hangar
Registration: Free activity with prior registration. Please send us a biography and a short motivation letter with the subject “Dance of Companionship” to antonio@hangar.org before March 9.

This call is a part of the Practicable research line.