Florencia Reznik from Buenos Aires, Argentina will have a residency in CLOUD from 18 till 23 december 2014 and from 5 till 11 january 2015 and she is looking for people to participate.
The idea is open to anyone. There is no need to commit to the whole time, you can drop by the days that are convenient for you. Please an email her some days in advance so she knows how many people are coming.
The residency includes yoga practice every morning from 10 to 11:30 – a warm up and mind-set for the rest of the day’s research. Feel free to take a class and “pay” by staying afterwards for a few hours as a participant in the research group, or pay 5€ from 10 am – 11:30 am (afternoon varies in time)
Contact: florenciareznik@gmail.com
Florencia will work on Tensegrity, proved to be a precise instantiation of the failure of the doctrine of functionalism and the triumph, instead, of a non-instrumentalized mode of invention.
What started as a marginal idea in the art field, was many years later used in architecture, medicine and biology. We are now putting this structural principle in movement through dance experimentation.
From *biotensegrity*, we pay attention to what connects all the parts of the body. We see the body as a whole. This approach considers the *fascia* essential to understand the body structure and its capacity to move.
Imagine that fascia is something similar to a fabric that covers our whole body. The tensegrity model posits that a single force in one part of the body will have an effect throughout the body. What would happen if that fabric covers not one but two bodies? Or more?
My interest is in how we (dancers, people) can enhance our experience of our body in connection to other bodies. In order to connect with others, we need to reach out, to move.
Trust is our relation with the unknown. Our body is physiologically prepared to be alert when it has to deal with something new, and this is translated into tension in the body. But there is something about letting go that allows us to move, to adapt, to be creative, and to connect with others. I think that *contact improvisation technique* can be a very useful tool to explore this.
I like to think of this residency as a research space-time. My background is in yoga, more precisely *Iyengar yoga*. Every morning we will start with a yoga practice that will bring consciousness to our body. With this starting point, the challenge will be to connect with other people through movement and contact. I am not a dance teacher. I will not teach how to do this. This is a challenge for me too. I hope that together we come up with creative strategies to do so.
After the yoga class, it comes lunch time (remember it is not advisable to eat two hours before yoga practice!). I suggest that during this time, we study *what is tensegrity, what is fascia, how is the body built*. I have reading material to share, and we can talk and discuss it.
Finally, during the afternoons, we will develop a series of exercises to put all this into practice. We will move with elastics, harnesses, fabrics and each others bodies. How does this movement feel? What can I do from here?* Let’s forget about the thoughts and the shapes, and focus on the joints, the mechanisms, the fluids that make strange noises inside us.
Last but not least, these topics are my main concern. But I am open to other things to come up as well. If someone has an interest that is somehow related to this, is more than welcome to share it!
— Flor Reznik
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