Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity is about proposing an embodied multisensory affectively and politically targeted way of knowing, grounded in sensitizing oneself to each other and the “more than human” sentience.
“You been swimming in gravity since the day you were born. Every cell knows where down is. Easily forgotten. Your mass and the earths mass calling to each other.” Steve Paxton
Dorte Bjerre Jensen on the content of the workshop:
As a dancer, artist, researcher and educator I am interested in our body ́s innate ability to respond physically to the environment, and the surprisingly ways we create relational matrices by composing our bodies in and with space. I wish to propose a practice of Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity. Caring with in the attendance to others, with asymmetry of touch, friction, senses, and smells, caring with inside the unequal, messy and troubled situations. Caring with as deep listening. “The practice of care creates the condition of being vulnerable to others. A vulnerability that creates space for unpredictable encounters: we are not in control, not even of ourselves… we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others.” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015, Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins).
Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity is about proposing an embodied multisensory affectively and politically targeted way of knowing, grounded in sensitizing oneself to each other and the “more than human” sentience, by asking: what modes of attention and practices of attunement can bring us into responsible relationships?
Gravity is our constant companion, and it is a force we all have in common as humans and non- human on this planet earth. Through playful and challenging guided explorations, we will work with sensing where the direction for down is by: letting gravity inform our bodies. You will get tools to move on your own, and tools for being in physical contact with others. We will practice the art of falling, catching ourself and each other, flying, rolling, sliding, balancing, losing balance, awkwardness, spiraling, weight sharing, counterbalance and the sense of mutuality and being in the unknown.
As an art worker and educator, Dorte Bjerre Jensens work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through movement, manifested as performance, participatory performative scores, live art installations, lectures, classes and workshops, and writing. Dorte has been practicing, teaching and performing contact improvisation for more than 20 years abroad and in Denmark. Currently also as an external supervisor at The Danish National School of Performing Arts and Lund university. From 2019-2022, she was a part of the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. As part of EER, she performed the piece Sharing Perspectives (SP) at Tate Modern London. SP that is grounded within the practice of contact improvisation and score design, gave a rare insight into the world of the other by embodying another person’s perspective. As ways to navigate the pandemic, she developed the performative scores, Greeting Cards (2020), which questioned and redefined the choreographed gesture greeting; and INviteME Online (2021), which invited participants to reconnect to their private spaces, plants, and each other. She publishes these collaborations in both artistic and scientific books and journals.
Her latest work Cluster of Forces, a hybrid between interactive installation and performance investigates everything is in flux, including our ability to survive! We are always already deeply connected to each other and the more-than-human through touch, fragrances and frequencies. It messes with the genius solo-artist and the interdependency of life and work, a feminist-materialist aesthetics of production.
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The dance artists leading the workshops of the mini-workshop series are visiting Helsinki with the joint Nordic project called Sustainable Dance Training. In addition to Zodiak's workshops, which are open to everyone, they lead morning classes for professionals at Tanssille ry. In the fall of 2023, two workshops of the mini-workshop series will be organized, and one more in the spring of 2024. Among the project's artists, Dorte Bjerre Jensen, Linda Blomqvist and Daniel Sarr will visit Zodiak. In these workshops, you can dive into dance while working from different perspectives.