WORKSHOPS
10-11 Feb ’24
Breaking Points: workshop with Prashant More (Goa)
10-11 Feb ’24
Movement Research: workshop with Somya Kautia (Mumbai)
10 Feb ’24
Producing Dance: workshop with Nelson Fernandez (London)
13-15 Feb ‘24
Hear and Now: workshop with cieLaroque (Salzburg)
13 March ’24
Practitioner’s Workshop with Don Gnu (Aarhus)
10 and 11 February ’24 | Breaking Points
contemporary dance workshop on physical skills, dance composition and movement research with Prashant More
Kolkata Centre for Creativity 5th Floor
10.30am to 1.30pm daily
Workshop Fee: Rs. 2000/- (both days) / Rs. 1200/- (one day)
Breaking Points is a Physical Movement Practice for dancers/movers that develops physical skills and intelligence by actively deconstructing the past and current movement vocabulary and patterns. The practice encourages creation and development of dance language derived consciously through stepping out of one’s comfort zone. The workshop will provide various frames of tasks, tools and methods to develop materials working with space, time, bodies, and objects to help make choices while creating. Through work alone, together, in small groups or pairs, the workshop gradually explores individual practice and builds awareness of our interests in movement and physical performances.
Prashant More will also be working with Somya Kautia to create a site-specific work with local dancers for LEAP THROUGH – PFS4 Weekend 2
Read more about that here.
Venue
Kolkata centre for Creativity
Dipak Road, Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, Anandapur, Adarsha Nagar, Kolkata, West Bengal 700107
10 – 11 February ’24 | Movement Research Workshop
10 to 11 February, 2024
Anuchintan Arts Centre (AAC), Santoshpur
11am – 2.30pm
Registration Fee: Rs. 1000/-
The 2-day Movement Research workshop with Somya Kautia would be directed towards performers, actors and movers.
Somya will work with guided movement improvisations to work on ‘Presence’. She will bring attention to elements like the mobility, quality, structure, feeling and weight of different body parts which will progress into work that engages with pauses to explore rhythm, shape-making and character. The sessions will work on ‘Play’ with energizing warm-ups, incorporating elements of Capoeira and floorwork leading to attack and escape games. The sessions are designed to cultivate awareness of bodies in space by creating partner/ group compositions.
Venue:
Anuchintan Arts Centre (AAC)
Premises No 33, 25, Kali Kumar Majumdar Rd, Bagan Bari, Santoshpur
Kolkata – 700075
10 February ’24 | Producing Dance
a workshop with Nelson Fernandez for artists, producers, presenters, and administrators wanting to explore issues involved in the presentation of dance as an art form
Kolkata Centre for Creativity 5th Floor
2.30pm to 5.30pm
Workshop Fee: Rs. 1000/-
How do dance artists and promoters discuss what is ideal, what is essential, and what is mutually acceptable? How do we get to a situation where there is the mutual trust that allows us to arrive at creative solutions. The workshop will explore the challenges in presenting dance and creating an environment supportive of dance; offering the required support to artists to create the best work; ensuring mutual trust between presenter and artist; and developing an engaged audience. The process will be practical and participative led by the facilitator – we will jointly ask the questions and seek answers that emerge from our collective experience.
This workshop is part of LEAP INTO : PSF4 Weekend 1
Venue
Kolkata centre for Creativity
Dipak Road, Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, Anandapur, Adarsha Nagar, Kolkata, West Bengal 700107
13 – 15 February ’24 | Hear and Now Workshop
13 to 15 February, 2024
Ek Tara Community Centre, Topsia
This is a 3-day exploration, creation and performance by CieLAROQUE – one of Austria’s most touring dance ensembles.
This workshop will explore short embodiment exercises and improvisation tools focusing on simple warm up. Participants will work on movement research in the style of CieLAROQUE. By using tasks, through partner exercises and isolations, the dancers will explore different and unusual combinations of the body beyond their comfort zone and relate to others with these movements.
For practitioners with some contemporary performance experience
Intensive 3-day workshop sessions that then leads to a performance opportunity in a public space with cieLAROQUE artists as part of their interactive production Hear and Now
Workshop: 10am to 2pm
Performance: 6pm onwards | 16 February 2024 | Newtown Community Zone
Registration Fee: Rs. 1,200/-
For practitioners from any movement background
Introductory 3-day workshop sessions
Workshop: 10am to 11.30am
Registration Fee: Rs. 800/-
This workshop is part of LEAP INTO : PSF4 Weekend 2
Venue
Ek Tara
597, Gobra, Kolkata, West Bengal 700046
13 March ’24 |Practitioners Workshop with Don Gnu
Padatik
6pm-9pm
Registration Fee: Rs. 1,000/-
Join a partnering workshop focusing on how to relate to movement through another body. Borrowing things from contact-improvisation, martial arts and dance through this workshop you will work on touch, sharing weight, body manipulation, lifts and how to find freedom in working with another body. This will be through technical and task based exercises and move into more free movement and composition.
Venue
Padatik
6, 7 A, Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose Rd, Mullick Bazar, Elgin, Kolkata
West Bengal 700017
Prashant More is an interdisciplinary artist from India. He engages in the field of dance as a performer, teacher, choreographer and dance filmmaker. He works towards creating immersive, intimate and experimental expressive physical performances. He studied dance in India and Europe. He graduated from Attakkalari, India, and worked as a company dancer. Later, he acquired intensive training in ‘Physical Experimental Performances’ and Choreography in Amsterdam and Berlin. As an educator, he teaches all ages and backgrounds as well as dancers, actors and performers of both professionals and non-professionals. His current research module is ‘Breaking Points’ in which the approach is to find an authentic flow of the physical body.
Somya Kautia is an interdisciplinary movement artist based in Mumbai. Her practice involves studying the mechanics and functionality of the body to become more aware of its/our primal movement potential and to then develop efficient ways of moving in harmony with gravity, other bodies, spaces and objects. She practices working with improvisation as a technique to listen and respond to our bodily sensations in different contexts that can allow us to interact creatively and purposefully. There is often an intersection between these two sides which she aims to bring out through her performative work.
After studying politics and philosophy at university, and beginning a doctoral degree in international relations, Nelson Fernandez decided to start full-time dance training. Intense study of classical ballet, Graham, Limon, and Cunningham techniques led to work with companies in the UK, continental Europe, and the USA performing in a wide spectrum of works by contemporary and classical choreographers. His work as a dancer, rehearsal director, and choreographer in West End musicals, TV dance shows, film, opera, and regular teaching in schools around Europe rounded out a professional career that lasted 22 years.
He turned his focus to the production of dance and drama in 1993. Through several work placements in theatres and festivals, he acquired a practical understanding of the basics of arts management, presentation, and production., and developed a clear understanding of how to support artists from the perspective of the presenter and the producer. He worked with British Council’s Visiting Arts for 12 years, ultimately as its Director of Operations. This led to extensive travel around the world and to the development of a variety of training programmes for arts producers in India as well as in a dozen other countries.
He formed NFA International Arts & Culture in 2008, which continues to develop various kinds of arts projects, including training programmes, the creation and touring of dance and drama productions, strategic analyses of arts-related issues for clients around the world, and the international touring of UK based companies.
CieLAROQUE/helene weinzierl is one of the most touring ensembles of Austrian dance scene and shows her productions since almost 30 years all over the world. Some of her productions feature a connection between dance and theatre; others are dedicated exclusively to a clear and intensive language of movement. Many of the productions focus on socio-politically relevant topics as well as on interactions with the audience.
DON GNU from Aarhus, Denmark – is a guarantee of physical action theatre and dance combined in a playful and poetic man-power universe!
The company was founded in 2010 by the two choreographers Jannik Elkær and Kristoffer Louis Andrup Pedersen, who also constitute the artistic duo at the helm of DON GNU. Today the company is one of the most touring companies in Denmark. In addition to extensive tour activities in Denmark, DON GNU has also toured in all the Nordic Countries, South Korea, Canada, big parts of Europe and Cuba.
The company’s name is built around the paradox embedded in the name DON GNU. Don as an individual, and Gnu (wildebeest) as a herd animal, the constellation of both the individual and the collective creates the dynamism, experimentation and development-basis for the ideas that are the hallmark of DON GNU productions.
