THE POLITICAL BODY

ABSTRACT

Our body is our identity. It is us. Us, our body, living in community. At that moment, the body therefore acquires a political dimension.

The pressure from the political system and its interests directly affects our body and the relationship we have with it. This necessarily concerns our work as performers, because it is our body that is on stage, showing, building and defending a dramaturgy.

When we talk about the political body, we refer to the practices and policies through which the powers of society rule the human body. This requires an ongoing work on the degree of individual and social control of our body, and on the awareness of how far our body can be free. These powers include institutional power expressed in government and laws, disciplinary power demanded in economic production, discretionary power exercised in consuming, and personal power negotiated in intimate relationships. Our political experiences are embodied; we do not merely think politics, we do and feel it.

Our performance may or may not have a political content, it may postulate statements, claims, protests, demands directly related to an issue that we define without much reflection as political. But it is always a political body, because it has been formed in an established framework that has shaped its subjectivity, its sense of expression and its artistic responsibility.
How does this affect our vision, our work as performers and builders of scenic realities, our physical presence on stage?

More than any other contemporary artistic practice, performance art is defined by the immediacy with which the performer expresses his or her position in the world he or she creates. In the precise act of performing, we question, through the public exposure of our relationship to status, the cultural rules that we might reject or accept.
Through a series of physical practices specially elaborated to answer this and other questions, we will explore and become aware of the political dimensions of our body to achieve the power of decision and control over what we want to do on stage and how to shape them from our daily lives and social contexts.

We will explore:

Body, identity and individuality.
The image I have of my body and what others see.
Whose is my body?
The embodiment of disobedience
Gender & Race
The body as an object
The limitations of time and space
Post-human body & technology
How free is my body?

Three Working Sessions
[16 hours]

Physical on Stage

PHYSICAL on STAGE is an introduction to the use of Physical Theatre Techniques focused on performers —dancers and choreographers— who aspire to transgress the definition of the conventional performance and get into the field of experimentation.

It aims to establish the basis for a physical language training understood as the main driving force for the dramaturgy of a hybrid staging.

It intends to make the performer aware of his role in the creative process of an inclusive performance. To do this, we offer a guide that can help the performer to explore and develop his initiative and creativity and try to motivate him to deepen into his knowledge & experience.

A training based on exercises that generates creative answers from the dancers to concrete scenic issues and explore their skills and limits.

A work that prompts and fosters the needs from the artists and its own world possibilities as well as explores the borders between dance and theatre.

Intend to give extra tools to dancers in order they achieve their own way of understanding how to became a more complete performer.