After the inspiring classes of Marta Reig Torres, we invited a new teacher to get your bodies and minds bent and stretched in ways you didn’t know you could do.

On 3 and 10 April, 10:30-12:00, Jack Gallagher (Bodies Anonymous) will come to CLOUD to teach his Vigorous Risk Technique class, which he is teaching all over Europe with great success.

Jack gives a rigorous upright class which challenges the body with a series of exercises based on expanding a body’s interaction with space and bringing artistry to the surface. The emphasis is on effective effort, dynamic versatility and calculated risk. The class combines different mental and physical efforts simultaneously, releasing one into the other, creating reciprocal flows of cause and effect.

The normal duality in dance between what is considered ‘formal’ or ‘theatrical’ dissolves into more contemporary issues: energy management, articulation, bio-feedback and making use of personal experience: The intelligence of our embodied cognition.

Vigorous Risk is a principled class, structured with an open view on the inter-dependency between the mental and the physical realms: brains, languages, signals become interactive with trunks, legs and heads.

By using questions like: “What goes where?” and “What effects what?” – a very different artistic experience is generated in contrast to and yet complimentary with ‘form based’ techniques.

By rigorously training the use of three primary efforts- directing, sourcing and sequencing, an artistic transparency arrives in the training.

By processing these efforts, the dancer learns what (s)he uses and is using, what (s)he has learned and is learning, releasing in the process her/his embodied cognition.