Preethi Athreya speaks to Spaces for Practice curator Vikram Iyengar about the key elements that form the points of departure for her intensive workshop, New Clearage: pre-existing material, new people, a new site. The meeting between these three factors opens up many facets of making performance based on key relationships between body, space and time. What are the tools and perspectives a choreographer needs to bring these three elements together in performance, what are the learnings for performers about their own bodies, about other bodies, about working together as an ensemble and community?
Preethi and our workshop participants have penned down their thoughts, musings and experiences during the workshop in their journals. Read on to get a peek at their practice.
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What happens when the body is caught between the structure of an existing work and the contours of an unknown site…? New Clearage is a work that precisely investigates this with dancers and non-dancers as they attempt to physically install themselves at the Belgachia tram depot, while at the same time entering into the complex mathematical structure of an older choreographic work called The Jumping Project. Engaging with simple everyday physical behaviour as performative action, they handle elements from the site as if to elicit new stories or forgotten ones. Inevitably, the question arises – is a space defined by the materiality of it’s construction or by the actions it witnesses?
by Preethi Athreya
20 Jan, 2023
AWARENESS ..starting of in the morning all the way from my place(which is in South kolkata) to reaching MYI for the first time …Figuring out how to commute the next day… … Meeting greeting each other… feeling the space… Blank yet excited 🤔… Awakening muscles and mind…. ….9 day routine … Understanding following.. Unfollowing tables, numbers, […]
I wake up in the morning to learn something new. And that led me to enter the doors of Myi studio. An aesthetic, cozy and happening space where I got to meet happy souls led by Preethi. It all started with taking small steps focusing our movement and awareness of our surroundings. Happy faces, Myi […]
Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, Calcutta is a not-for-profit
company registered under Section 8 of The Companies Act, 2013.
The company was incorporated on 12 July 2017.
