Spring lab 2018 - Amsterdam is a wrap!

The following is a short review of our activities during the four days we spent together with a group of enthousiastic movers in the Clifford Studio in Amsterdam.
 
During these days, four different choreographers guided a 3-hour lab adressing a specific creative question:

• Hayley Adams conducted a physical research circling around the concepts of spiral and swing, looking closely at the effort these two actions entail, and focusing on them as imagery as well. In the last part of the lab the notion of a kaleidoscope was also tried out, in order to put those efforts and patterns in space, looking at different possibilities to move a group.
• Gabriela Zuarez conducted a practical workshop related to her work. She explained her approach and connection to the world of Tango, and how she wants to approach it’s cultural baggage from a contemporary perspective. Going back to the basics of Tango, she then experimented with us on how to turn the rythmical (for instance) limitation of Tango into a means to personal expression.
• Sanne Clifford conducted a lab with the assistance of Sandra Kramerova, where she tried out some specific scenes she envisions for her upcoming piece “NOTE TO SELF”, to be premiered at Amsterdam Fringe Festival in September ’18.
• Last, Anja Gallagher divided the participants into four small groups to come up with different ways to connect dance and video. This was also related to her new creative project: a piece for very young audience (age 4-8) where she intends to play with the possibilities video can add to a dance piece when it comes to enhance the childrens imagination. Storytelling, playing with planes and distances, shadow-games, duplicity... a lot of possibilities were tried out and shown to the group during the last part of the lab.

 
Next to the labs, Corneliu Ganea – Dutch based Romanian choreographer – popped by on Friday to give a workshop on his current work, showing us a couple of phrases from his last pieces HORA and TABULA RASA. On Sunday, lecturer Jordi Ribot Thunnissen offered a conference in the garden of the Clifford Studio covering a quick review of Western theatre dance history in order to challenge the phrase “I don’t understand dance”. Dance and proximity to its audience was one of the big topics of his conference. 
 
And of course, we saved quite some time to offer the participants playground time. During these time-slots, participants where able to fill in the blancs and try out some ideas of their own. The value of the playgrounds was highlighted by all the participants, a tendency that we have observed in all the labs so far. We are thus encouraged to continue to provide for these safe creative spaces within our structure in the labs to come!
News about the upcoming labs for the season 2018 – 2019 will be published on this website soon, so stay tuned! Here you can subscribe to our newsletter, and don’t forget to like our facebook page to stay updated on all our activities.