Abstract for the ArtEZ workshop

[addressed to the Master of Choreography workshop in the context of the Inventing Futures symposium | December 2013]

 

Intentionality/Potentiality: Uncovering latencies and provoking transformation through movement and text.

The session proposed is a workshop/presentation focusing on the idea of self and social transformation, which will explore with the participants the experience of potentiality for transformation held inside the intentional engagement of the body and the intentional heightening of the process of choosing words.

Dr. Kate Adams (lecturer in Drama at the University of Salford), Christina Christofi (theatre director) and Medie Megas (choreographer) began a collaborative research process in March 2012, stemming from each of our current practices and focusing on the idea of ‘Transformation’. The three of us came together in the context of the current situation in Greece, responding to a widespread debate on issues of social change and the role of the arts in a changing society. During the process we worked with movement and text, continually exchanging roles as task setters and doers.

What interested us most was the difference between closed systems of transformation, which move between two well defined points, and open systems of transformation, where one begins from a fixed point and works outwards from it. Accepting this openness and uncertainty seems to us to be the key element of effective transformation.

Through our practice it became obvious that this idea of potentiality links to the notion of latency in that the seed of a future state is latent in the former state. Also out of this process arises the idea of waste, as certain latent elements of a situation evolve into something, whereas others inevitably fall out of existence.

The workshop/lecture we propose will be led by all three of us and will contain a combination of movement and writing tasks, as well as a presentation and discussion. We would need a studio space and sound system. The duration of workshop would ideally be one and a half to two hours.