Dancing New Ecologies Lab
This series of workshops led by Emilie Darlet & Rick Nodine invite participants to explore through Contact Improvisation new ways of encountering and relating, of supporting one another through deep listening in a playful and mindful co-creation. It is an invitation for training one's body and mind to value and welcome the unpredictable and build creatively from it, a space where one may experiment with rehabilitating the body as a valid starting point for decision making and collaboration.
A space shaping minds and bodies to interact in entirely new ways with the world around, leaving us more agile and better equipped to navigate unexplored territories and deftly respond to the unexpected, characteristic of post-pandemic times. More agile and better equipped to design sustainable forms of being together.
︎︎︎ emilie darlet
Emilie Darlet is a London-based cultural worker and dance activist. Her practice is rooted in the belief that alongside public policies, personal endeavours may too repair and renew our relationship to the world: practices embedded with environmental and social care, that foster mutual support, value collaboration above competition and cultivate a sensibility for ethics. Although these everyday activisms may barely be visible in the public arena, they hold a powerful potential for political change. Her work consists in disseminating such practices. Curating spaces and contexts for harnessing and channelling participants' creativity and craving for change in order to promote and support personal active responses to the social and political concerns of our times. Promoting through these initiatives the development of those critical skills that may afford participants a sense of ownership of what our world may become.
︎︎︎ rick nodine
Rick Nodine spent 10 years working as a dancer and 20 years teaching at London Contemporary Dance School. He now teaches in the world to anyone who wants to dance. He teaches Contact Improvisation because it changes what people think/feel is possible.
Starting by lying together on the floor, we will work together to disrupt our social and professional personas by relinquishing the upright stance of competent capitalist subjects. While close to the floor we will reclaim a harmonious relationship to earth by surrendering to the pull of gravity and accessing pleasure in non-goal oriented movement. We will move on to radically reorient our relationship to physical proximity through experiments in non-gendered, non-manipulative, non-hierarchical touch.
By reframing touch as communication based on receptivity and ‘listening’ we will have a chance to observe what selves we become when we stop practicing the capitalist physicality of dominance and submission.
Infos: emilie.darlet@network.rca.ac.uk