Embodiment Within Dance Reception
Naama Ityel & Diana Sirianni
The goal of the workshop is to prepare the audience to encounter a dance piece. We want to create a condition of connection, openness and sensibility that will allow people to be moved by the performance they will assist right after our workshop.
The workshop interweaves theory and physical practices. The participants are led through various exercises that increase their connection to sensations and imagination, supporting a process of embodiment to align thoughts, emotions, perception.
We support a different way of understanding the relationship between art production and art reception. Art is a mutual creation taking place between artists and receivers. In order for the art to express itself in its full potential, we need to work on both sides. In this context, we work in order to “elevate” the spectators into a place of connection where they can be fully receptive and moved by the art.
The performers tune in, warm up and make a significant process in order to connect to their creativity, sensitivity and intelligence. The public on the other hand arrives to art most of the time from the capitalistic city life, overworked, exhausted and overstimulated. This gap between the artist’s and the public’s reality prevents a full reception.
In our workshop, we want to connect people to their bodies and give them space and time to get available to receive the dance performance.
A person can’t perceive dance without their own body. People sit entire days in front of computers and to-dos lists and arrive to the theatre exhausted and unavailable. Therefore it becomes harder and harder for dance to penetrate the audience. As the body is inaccessible, the audience tends to intellectualize what they perceive, and by doing so it misses the actual potential that dance has, which is a way wider and transformative.
Acker Stadt Palast, Berlin, 2018, supported by Tanzbüro Berlin within the program “Mapping Dance Berlin 2018/19”
Photo: Diana Sirianni