Workshop "Choreography and Performative Techniques of The Self/Group" (led in English)

An important point about the relationship between performance and public space concerns the various performative techniques that have been developed in the contexts of choreography and business management, which consider the differences as much as the similarities between these approaches of social behaviour.
In order to approach these questions, TkH's members are organizing a workshop led by performance and coaching specialists in the fields of dance and business culture. This will be an opportunity to share various practices within a group of participants who come from these different fields, giving them a chance to further explore their ideas on behavioural models in today's society.


Workshop Introduction
The question of self-performance cannot be separated from our relationship to society; it is also at the core of education. To prepare for professional life also means to reflect on the building of an identity and its realization in diverse situations and groups. As part of their research on performance and public space, the TkH collective invites dance students (of practice and/or theory) and business management students to attend a workshop about existing techniques for self-presentation in the social sphere. The aim of this workshop is to contrast two different approaches of "performance of the self", by practicing dance and performance techniques as well as business management techniques. The goal is to uncover the professional gestures, figures and technologies of the self/group that lend the social specific meanings and functions on a daily basis. Each group of students may thus enrich their perspective, discover new methodologies and reconsider their own practices and experience in relation to those of the other group.

The workshop will be led by two experts from the chosen fields at the invitation of the TkH collective: Christine De Smedt, Belgian choreographer, specialist of group technologies and Siegmar Zacharias, German performer and specialist of rhetoric who teaches business managers.

Christine de Smedt: having graduated in criminology, Christine De Smedt‘s interest moved to dance and performance, and she started studying different movement research techniques. Her artistic work combines elements of dance/performance, choreography, artistic coordination and other artistic projects. She has been a member of the ballets C de la B dance company since 1991 and has been performing her own work since 1993. This includes a solo piece entitled la force fait l’union fait la force, a travelling project in the Balkan Escape Velocity (1998) and between 2000 and 2005, the large scale project 9x9, focussing on mass and choreography and which was performed in 15 cities across Europe and Canada.  In 1992 she worked with the interdisciplinary SKITE project (‘laboratoire de nouvelles formes chorégraphiques’) in Paris which marked Christine’s first artistic encounter with Meg Stuart. This was the start of a close collaboration with Stuart, running from 1995 to 1999, which included devising and dancing in No one is watching, a remake of Disfigured Study and the creation of Splayed mind out by Meg Stuart and Gary Hill, artistically assisted and performed by Christine De Smedt. Christine De Smedt, Meg Stuart and David Hernandez initiated and curated the multidisciplinary improvisation project Crash Landing (1996-1999). Christine De Smedt also collaborated with Mette Edvardsen, Marten Spangberg, Christelle Fillod, Milli Bitterli and Susanne Berggren, and performed in Project and Floor Pieces by Xavier Le Roy. Between 2005 and 2008 she worked with Eszter Salamonon on nvsbl and dance#1/driftworks and the group project Transformers. In 2007, Christine worked with Myriam Van Imschoot, creating Pick Up Voices, a piece that mixes historical research, performance and shadow play. Christine De Smedt is currently working on a solo project involving portraits of different artists, as well as being involved in a wide range of other artistic collaborations.In 2010 Christine De Smedt initiated the first Summer Intensive, a residency in studio 3 at les ballets C de la B. She is currently also involved in artistic projects and collaborations with Xavier Le Roy (Low Pieces) and Jan Ritsema (Agora project).

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and teacher of rhetoric. Her works develop formats of theatre-, lecture-, and multimedia-performances and installations, dealing with questions of participation and being together. They are situated between philosophy and sensuality, humour and labour, do-it-yourself low tech and high tech, and have been described as “Visionary. Challenging. Witty”. They have been presented in theatres throughout Europe, in glasshouses, clubs, galleries, in the woods, and up in the sky. Newer works are SWEAT- The Movie, The Pavilion of Hot Air and Hopes, You & Me together. My first…, fear_lab, perforated paradise, zero, Dracula 89/03. She was co-curator of the Black-Market of useful knowledge and non-knowledge, and part of International Festival: THE THEATRE. Siegmar Zacharias is the initiator of the project Super! Power! What is it to participate in Europe and in Art, and cofounder of SXS Enterprise. Siegmar studied philosophy and comparative literature in Berlin and London, and performance art at DasArts in Amsterdam. She also teaches rhetoric within business corporations.
www.myspace.com/siegmarzacharias


Informations
The workshop will take place from April 5th-11th, 2012. Each sessions will last 3 hours (2pm-5pm and 6pm-9pm), take place at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, and will be open to about twenty students.

Inscriptions
Virginie Bobin, v.bobin@leslaboratoires.org and +33(0) 153 561 594