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It’s April now, and the summery climes of August might seem like they’re a million miles away, but they’re coming our way, soon — and with them, the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival!
And, as part of the kaleidoscopic smorgasbord of performative prisms presented by the festival, there will be workshops. To be more exact, there will be three interlocking workshops, facilitated by Benoît Lachambre, Frederic Gies, and Robert Steijn and Ricardo Rubio — all vastly experienced teachers, all offering a fascinatingly diverse array of particpatory possibilities.
Let’s get to the all-important details right away:
All three of these workshops will be delving far into fascinating encounters with bodily awareness, performative explorations, and somatic encounters — and we wanted to give a small glimpse into some of the recent work and thoughts of these teachers and practitioners. Let’s jump in...
Robert Steijn and Ricardo Rubio have developed a far-reaching, comprehensive collaboration which often explores elements of trust and intimacy. As they describe it:
“Ricardo Rubio and Robert Steijn found each other in a poetic universe in which silence coexists with the rhythm of life, seriousness finds its alter ego in humor, and nature-culture is questioned from an intimate perspective. They ask themselves if they can redefine male intimacy, detached from the imprint of our cultural upbringings, and if they can redefine tenderness as another way of thinking, behaving, and perceiving reality.” One of the recent outcomes of this work is their piece Prelude on Love (A research into male intimacy and tenderness). The trailer below gives a sense of the work. It overlaps with the themes of their workshop, which they describe, in part, by saying: “we try to practise tenderness in everything we do, working from the embracing quality of the heart — and we will investigate how to provoke the magic to happen in what we do.”
Benoît Lachambre is returning to Ponderosa in 2018, after last year’s epic month-long workshop. This year, he will be continuing his work exploring the materialisation of presence and relational memory.
Benoît’s work often involves a heightened awareness of the dynamics of fluids, aiming to reconnect with the innermost sensations of the body. Much of the recent documentation of these approaches is online in French only — such as this interview, below, that Benoît undertook with Corpuscle Danse.
The work of Frederic Gies has often considered the parallels between the ancient, corporeal roots of all dance and movement, and the automated pulse of contemporary techno and club culture. His work from 2016, Dance is Ancient, is one of the works that has investigated this paradoxical overlap. There are longer excerpts from the work available on Frederic’s Vimeo page, and the trailer is seventeen seconds of joyous juxtaposition.
All three of these workshops promise to be transformative encounters, and we’re very much hoping that we’ll be able to see you out here for one — or all — of these events. You can sign up to participate in any and all of them right here. And if you have any questions or comments that you’d like to let us know about, please get in touch. Hopefully we’ll see you out here in the summer!
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The Ponderosa Blog is an ongoing experiment in putting one foot in front of the other, and one word after another, to transfer ideas in ones and zeroes to minds around the world and beyond. A rumble from a ruined speaker to maybe bring the gov’t. down, one sorry heart at a time. xo
June 2019
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