Choreography of Care – online workshop for women (open call)
Choreography of Care – online workshops by Renata Piotrowska-Auffret, jointly conducted by Aleksandra Osowicz
4-7 October 2021, Monday-Thursday, 20:00, GMT+4
We invite everyone identifying as women, regardless of their age.
Participation in workshops is free of charge. The workshop will be held online.
Prior dance and movement experience is not necessary.
The Poles: Choreography of care – joint project of Performat Foundation (PL) & Circe Platform – Experimental Platform for Dance and Theatre (GR)
About the project:
The project marks the second installment of the Polish-Georgian cooperation between organisations working in the field of dance and modern choreography, the Performat Foundation and Circe Platform. Last year, we focused on the role of women in relation to the centenary of the Polish women’s suffrage. Expanding upon this perspective, this year we would like to discuss the potential relations between artistic work and care, between choreography and humans as well as between choreography and nature.
During our collective discussions and workshop sessions, we would like to zoom in on artistic practice with special attention paid to care work and artistic work.
About the workshop:
During our practical and theoretical workshops, we will conduct choreographic and motion / movement activities as well as discuss a selection of texts. From the bodily perspective, we will attempt to create a movement and choreography practice founded on the sense of community, listening to one another, and experiencing one’s body as well as on the strength derived from the bodily organicism and biology. From the intellectual perspective, we will attempt to create a vision of a new system, of new strategies of building an image of a woman’s body and its treatment.
During the workshops, the group will read and discuss feminist and eco-feminist texts by among others Mona Chollet, Sarah Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, and Emilie Hache. Tasks conducted in the course of the sessions will be dependent upon the relation between theory and practice. Choreography is understood broadly: as strategies and ways of relating thoughts and bodies in motion in a given educational, artistic, or social context.
Together, we will take a close look at care in the context of our individual work with our own bodies and creation of horizontal interhuman relations. We will discuss, visualize, and envision what the world and politics, if based on relations founded on care, could look like. We will make a concerted effort to establish a community of women and specify our aims in the social context: how to increase the visibility of women artists, women mothers, and other people with tutelary responsibility. With the assistance of choreographic tools, we will search for relations grounded in respect and care for oneself and the entire group.
Fusing theory and practice, the workshop meeting will enable us all to notice the social dimension of choreography. This experience can be of significance to all the participants “right here, right now”, but it can also become the driving force behind further individual and collective activities conducted in a wider social and political context.
We invite everyone identifying as women, regardless of their age.
Participation in workshops is free of charge. Prior dance and movement experience is not necessary.
If you are interested in the workshop, please send your request at circeplatform@gmail.com | FB event
Choreographer and teacher:
Renata Piotrowska-Auffret – choreographer and artist; in her works she uses tools of experimental dance, performative arts, dramaturgy, and theatre. Piotrowska-Auffret contemplates the contemporary world by deriving her inspirations from intimate experiences, real and fictional, embedded in a given social context. She is interested in the perversity of relations between the historical and contemporary body politics, between the public and the private, as well as between text and movement.
She was a priority artist in the frame of Aerowaves Twenty17 and Aerowaves Twenty19. Since 2014, she has started a series of Private Pieces – performances putting at stake female body politics, oscillating between the private and the public. As she describes her works: “I am a female artist, I am a woman, I am a mother – so the polarization of the body touches me directly. I always have a personal and autobiographical urgency to do the work.” As a result of working with politically involved themes, the private pieces have already been created.
Within the Private Pieces series, she has created: Death: Exercises and Variations (2014), The pure gold is seeping out of me (2017) and Flatland of Limp Muscles (2019). Her most recent piece is Danse Macabre (2021).
Since 2019 she is researching in the notion of care in a context of motherhood and artistic practices. She participated in Parent Hood conference organized by Dansehallerne and created podcasts Dare to care for Gand Re Union. Since 2020 she is developing her first curatorial project Institute of Care.
Piotrowska-Auffret is a holder of the Exerce Master Choreographic degree at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) in Montpelier and a graduate of the Theatre Academy in Białystok.
„The Poles. Choreography of Care” is supported by Tbilisi City Hall, Adjara Group (GR).
Partner of the project is Polka dot Foundation (PL).
Subsidised within the remit of the 2017-2022 NIEPODLEGŁA Multi-Annual Programme, as part of the „Cultural Bridges” Programme conducted by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute www.culture.pl
More at Circe Platform (WWW & FB) & Performat Foundation (WWW & FB) channels