Collaborative Physics and Sensorial Poetics

 

Collaborative Physics and Sensorial Poetics

a 2 weekend intensive in Contact Improvisation explored as bio-mechanical play and experiential art.

with Karl Frost (US/Germany)

22-23 and 29-30 March, 2025

Leipzig Germany Fudoshin Aikido Dojo  Josephstraße 45 in Leipzig  (a convivial, focus-inspiring space with a padded floor)

Registration and logistics at bottom

Contact Improvisation is a 50 year old art-sport exploring the possibilities of bodies moving through physical contact:  support, flow, resistance, lifts, and falling together through space.

This workshop will be one part technical work to two parts poetic exploration.  Technical explorations develop  functional physical awareness of self and other. Poetic explorations investigate art-making and poetic sensibility in movement together through physical contact. We develop tools and perspectives for distilling and diversifying our explorations of physical contact. We use the metaphor of “poetry” in creative exploration, searching for the ineffable, imaginative landscapes, “meaning”, and the felt experience.  The technical work is both a pleasure in itself and a tool for more refined art-making.

The felt experience…

San Francisco dance theater choreographer and performance artist Joe Goode  emphasized in his work the “felt experience” … not simply the technical tumble of bodies and chain reactions of response, but feeling the details and playing with  ineffable “meaning”, interior pleasure, and real, present curiosity.  How do we create it?  How do we get our ordinary sense of identity out of the way so it can happen?  This felt experience will be a guide.

Technical work…

We explore the mechanics of two interdependent bodies in motion. We try on different two-body movement pathways and principles, expand our movement possibilities with lifts and shared falls.  Some will be familiar, looked at for their details, making them new again.  Some will be perhaps unfamiliar, used to expand our gross movement range.  The inner technical work is based on the  Passive Sequencing framework.  Developed out of principles from contemporary release technique, Alexander technique, and practices from the internal martial arts, Passive Sequencing focuses on releasing compulsive or nervous reaction.  This in turn allows for finer awareness of our own body use and how we affect the state and body-use of our partner. We increase moment-to-moment functional awareness through tuning into proprioception – our physical experience of the body.  Paradoxically as we release nervous reactivity, we are able to perceive our physical world in more frames per second, in finer detail. We soften the mind and body, finding greater ease, speed, and power.  This more present awareness can be applied both to the mechanical play of CI or to the poetic encounter. Through more sophisticated movement intelligence (as opposed to “muscling through”) we find a more dynamic perception in time, informed  by our accumulated skills but less hindered by attachment to physical habit. Through releasing awareness-limiting patterns of over-control, we find dense, rich awareness of and participation in human interaction.

Physical Poetics…

Where the base practice of contact improvisation focuses on the physics of bodies moving through contact, the felt experience of contact, the emotional echoes and evocations of CI are a parallel, endless investigations!  We dance not just the physical body, but the imaginative body, the emotional body, the sensory body.

Emotion, feeling, body-memory, imagination and theater, abandonment to sensory exploration, states of being and awareness, the de/reconstruction of structures of physicality and the intimate, the personal and interpersonal, and the possibilities of emotional bodies in motion… these are  explorations in poetics.

We give ourselves more permission to explore the felt experience of the dance and explore how to hold space and provide a frame for another’s experience beyond the conventional social. When we explore the mechanics and physics of a dance, what is it to do this from a place of the felt experience of the movement? Practices of mindful observation of emotion and sensation as they arise allow for more aware and creative relationship with our felt experience.

We explore a poetic play with experienced meaning in movement and the senses.  “Meaning” may be in the pleasure of kinesthetic experience, curiosity, and physics.  It may be in the poetry of sensation, emotion, and experienced image. We begin by distilling specific mechanical processes or sensory foci.  As with writing a poem, there is a blend of intentional composition with improvisation and felt inspiration. We identify and hold to foci in the dance in a sense of collaborative art-making that moves us. Themes are only limited by imagination and our vocabulary for naming experience… skin, slowness, playfight or martial dance, architecture, momentum, image, texture, pressure, comfort, ease, slipperiness, character, small flights, or perhaps something else clear yet un-nameable.

Distilling…  We get specific and then get more specific still, choosing from intuition or artistic curiosity. By narrowing our focus and allowing this specificity to reshape our whole body-use, we find a freedom to explore territories that habit and daily social impulse prevent us from discovering.  For example, by holding our attention on specific qualities of sensation of skin or fascia or by narrowing our movement to specific ranges of speed, this restriction launches us into new territories that freely wandering attention would otherwise never allow. This allows for a more nuanced interplay of deliberate intention and abandon in finding more meaningful dances.

Commitment to specificity and distillation of focus frees from our conventional social selves.

The poetry we play with is the poetry of inner experience shaped by and interlocking with the physical.  The goal is a blending of felt meaning and artistry. 

For this workshop, we draw from research questions from Body Research’s interactive performance works, Axolotl, Proximity, and Tocame, all exploring performance not as something seen, but experienced. We dive into our own experience. We hold space and create context for others to do the same. We create together a mutually supportive temporary community of personal exploration.

Logistics:

All attending are expected to already have at least an introduction to contact improvisation.

Space limited to 25. Based on previous versions of this workshop, it is likely to fill, so registering early is recommended.

Staying overnight in the studio is available for out-of town dancers

Workshop is in English

Fees:

Registration paid by… Sliding scale… pay what you can within the range.  No one turned away for lack of funds, so if you can’t afford the lower end, write, and something can usually be worked out, though this is usually easier if done earlier
22 February 200 – 500e
8 March 240- 500 e
After 8 March 280-500 e

Registration: To register, do BOTH of the following

Partial attendance?

The priority is for those who can do both weekends.  If there is space in the workshop still after early registration, then there will be some possibilities for partial attendance.  If this is the case, the first weekend would be generally open, and the second would be open to those who have done a single weekend workshop with related material with Karl in the past.

Karl Frost has been teaching and performing contact and related work in body-based creative process for the over 38 years. He is known internationally for his dynamic and articulate movement style, his rigor in physical research and teaching, and for the edge-pushing nature of his work in both practice and performance. His work, influenced by studies in contemporary release technique, Alexander technique, and martial arts, has been showcased across the states, Canada, Europe, South America, and Israel. His performances, via Body Research Physical Theater, take the body and emotionally and physically felt experience as their reference points, often in highly audience interactive frameworks.

Karl holds a PhD in Ecology (emphasis in Human Ecology and Cultural Evolution Theory), and MFA in Dramatic Arts, and a BA in Physics. He is currently working as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, where he works on visual anthropology (photography and video) and theoretical studies in cultural evolution.