D&D SummerSchool

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DansBrabant is active in creating a positive dance climate in the south of the Netherlands, to show a wide variety of challenging perspectives through dance and to help talented choreographers practise their profession in a robust and independent way, with a sound artistic and conceptual basis. DansBrabant currently collaborates with Katja Heitmann, Corpo Máquina/ Guilherme Miotto, Hilde Elbers, Johnny Lloyd and Sandman/Sabine Molenaar.

DansBrabant focuses particularly on assigning words to dance and encouraging discussion on dance. In this way, we hope to increase the interest in the medium, both in terms of quantity and quality. In this regard, our publications are diversely instrumental and we work together with journalists,a cionados, specialists and literary authors.

Radioactive bodies

24 fragments – D&D-essay

‘Sometimes the website displays: “this event has expired”, or: “this event does not exist”. However, something is always going on.’

ARE WE REALLY EVER PART OF A PERFORMING ARTS ORGY?

Last Resistance by Annemijn Rijk

‘My thoughts are in a weird sort of dialogue with the performance, am I being choreographed or am I choreographing them?’

Water floats if allowed to

On Lois Alexander’s performance Neptune

A stream of poetry-consciousness from seeing Lois Alexander’s performance Neptune. Written by: Rania Broud (Norway).

A Preparation for this Stage

Punk Your Spirit by Keren Rosenberg

‘At first, I am not sure if the transmission is grainy, but soon realize that the body is covered in some kind of golden coating.’

Essay on emptiness

Part 1: Silence

What does it mean to be a human being in a time of pandemic, and can art provide alleviation?

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

Texts that get under your skin

They were guests for three days at Theaterfestival Boulevard: writers Saskia from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Elske from Antwerp, Anette and Rania from Bergen in Norway and David from New York.

Emotions in circles

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

You are here – Says this years Boulevard Theaterfestival’s slogan. Here I am. Excited and nervous for the unexpected. Perhaps just like the performer(s).

There she could/had to participate

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

‘I’m reminded of a good friend of ours who, when he comes to stay, finishes off all our milk. He is cheerful and disarming. He has no trouble asking for what he wants.’

Bodies

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

‘We’ve come to a workshop more than a performance. And we might not have asked for it, but really what else is there to learn but how to care for one another, how to connect, how to love.’

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

To practice togetherness in public

‘I realise, small moments of togetherness have always moved me, especially when they happen between strangers. The way we form temporary units or collectives is very appealing to me.’

Go ahead and look

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

‘I think she’s naturally kind, even kinder because of her early brush with mortality, grateful for every new day, that sort of thing.’

My hopeless attempts to connect

‘But here I am. Only two blocks away from home. Attending workshops.
About intimacy and making contact.’

I’ll show you

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

‘All those eyes on her body. All those different eyes, with different thoughts, with different perceptions of looking, of seeing.’

How I would explain the landscape opera to my grandfather

Dance&Dare SummerSchool

‘First I saw only one woman. She was wearing a green fisherman’s suit and green rubber boots. Her neck and arms were bare. The music changed to organ music.’

Human beings

Essay on Performing Gender Night

I was at the theatre and found myself in a modern-day paradise. The most beautiful trees in the world were not there, neither were the brightly coloured parrots sitting in those trees. No river graced by elegant swans and no schools of fish swimming in that river. No romping tigers and no curious horses. No […]

Organism of Bodies

Essay on Performing Gender Night

‘The group moved around each other and with each other organically, forming a constellation of bodies. Planets moving around their own core and the cores of each other.’

The man and the ball in a landscape of sounds

Dance & Dare – .Ball (work-in-progress)

‘He is still a boy. A tough self-conscious searching fearful boy.’

Words for dance, dancing words

Dance & Dare – Final essay

‘A modern form of physical being in the world is when you see people patting their trouser pocket for their mobile phone.’

System Error

Dance & Dare – Essay on Siri Loves Me

‘Sometimes I wish I knew for certain which steps to take and when to take them.’

Thin Line

Dance & Dare – Essay on Even Worse

‘If it happens accidentally, we call it falling.
If intended, we call it dance.’

For Nico

Dance & Dare – The beginning

‘You describe wild dancing, cowboy-style. Bowls of snacks and glass-topped tables people fall through.’

D&D SummerSchool

My hopeless attempts to connect

Text: Saskia de Haas

Last year I attended a workshop in Guatemala. It was about intimacy. I always feel uncomfortable only thinking about these kinds of workshops, but my curiosity won.
There was a lot of hugging. I hate hugging people I hardly know.
During one of the exercises I had to partner up with a stranger. I connected with a girl of my own age. We had to look each other deep in the eyes. We were silent, but it felt like we were telling each other a lot. Then we had to share our deepest secret. She looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes, as if she was raising the tension. All possibilities of secrets were passing my mind. She opened her mouth and broke the silence.
“My joni is on fire!”, she almost yelled with this crazy gaze in her eyes.
The intimate moment we just had, broke into thousand pieces.
After this three hour workshop experience with a lot of hugging, playing animals and telling “deep secrets”, I promised myself to never, never do this again.

But here I am. Only two blocks away from home. Attending workshops.
About intimacy and making contact.

I’m sitting on the ground, in front of a stranger. I think circle and close my eyes for a few seconds.
I open my eyes and look at the point between the eyebrows of the stranger in front of me.
“Sending, sending, sending, send”, I say pretty intense, while sending the word ‘circle’ with my mind. The stranger in front of me raises her eyebrows and sighs.
“Circle?”
I nod enthusiastic. The stranger remains silent.
“It is your turn now.”
“Send”, she says bored.
“Triangle?”, I guess.
She nods yes, but doesn’t seem to be impressed at all.

After this telepathic contact with a stranger, I have to fall in love with an object. I scan all objects in the room. I lay my eyes on this green-blue fluffy ball. I don’t know why. Maybe because it looks soft and funny.
Unfortunately I have to share my love. With two others. With a man and a woman. They don’t even seem to notice me. I see how they touch the ball and look each other in the eye full of recognition of their shared love. I feel second row. I give up and make myself believe it’s more exiting to not know how the ball really feels.

The workshops are led by Jija, Andrea and Lucy. There is also a “mama” listening to an audiobook while lying down on a mattress. She wears sunglasses.

Lucy is in an electric wheelchair. She is very disabled.
With a blue and pink sponge in her hands, Lucy tells us how she is washed every morning by a caregiver. Her voice sounds sweet and soft.
She rubs the pink sponge softly over the leg of Jija. The blue sponge is for the upper body, she tells us. The pink sponge for the lower body.
I can’t imagine how it feels to let a ‘stranger’ wash me, touch every part of my body. I try to imagine how I want to be washed by a stranger. But it is difficult to know. I imagine too soft can make it erotic, but too rough and practical can make it cold and detached, almost like ignoring the intimacy of the action. Because it is intimate.

Jija asks Lucy how it feels to have intimacy when you can’t use your whole body. Andrea suggests to bond her, to tie her up with tape, so she can experience. Lucy emphasizes bonding doesn’t mean you have to be passive.
While tied up, Jija looks very vulnerable. She search for the limits of her body. Slowly she moves her head, her neck. Then she moves her folded body. With a lot of attention Jija moves the parts she can moves. She crawls slowly over the floor. Andrea lies her body against the body of Jija.

Not by attending workshops and telling each other ‘deep secrets’.
Not by telepathic contact or by falling in love with an object. But here, in this moment, while watching the connection between Jija and Andrea and while listening to Lucy’s frank story, I finally connect and find intimacy.

ABOUT DANCE&DARE
Essay from Saskia de Haas after seeing Preview: Lands of Concerts: Body Work Edition by Jija Sohn, Andrea Zavala Zavala Folache & Lucy Wilke at Theaterfestival Boulevard 2019. Saskia is 1 of the participants of the Dance&Dare SummerSchool, an international project for creative writers who dare to look for new words for dance and performance, by Domain for Art Criticism & DansBrabant. Read all the essays on the DansBrabantBlog.