Some Practical City Magic: Physical and Imaginative Practices for a Future City

#dance #performance

The seminar proposes a practical exploration of cities as a physical space for living together using various locations in Berlin as its model. Through bodywork and imaginative practices, participants explore instructions to take back to their own cities and contexts and forward in their own creative work.

It specifically examines to which extent imaginative, choreographic and somatic practices generate new space that both resists the neoliberal tendencies of urban developments and enables new insights into the urban as a collective space for action.  In particular, it is about everyday practical action, about choreographic scores, instructions for action, visualisation and exploration. We will propose invitations that insist on the potential for transformation through our bodies, their movements and perceptions in and for urban space and thus on what is literally in our own hands.

We understand magic too as the directing of attention and imagination in order to effect change. As an interface between clear protocols of action and surprising developments, between what is visible and what is revealed, magic challenges our collective embodied perspectives and can enable new shared experiences. It takes imagination seriously and is at the same time an exercise in playfulness. Are these qualities still applicable to everyday urban activity, given the challenges to which the city, and almost all city dwellers, is and will be exposed in the future?

Based on Sabine Zahn and Daniel Belasco Rogers’ long standing artistic practice, both individually and as collaborators, the workshop will explore these issues of being in and transforming the experience of cities. As long-term Berliners and active participants in the city’s urban practice scene, Sabine and Daniel will lead the peripatetic workshop to initiatives across the city. Basing ourselves at the UdK and the Floating University, the Venice Architectural Biennial award-winning rainwater retention basin at Südstern we will venture out across the city, making the workshop an ideal choice for people wanting to encounter Berlin’s vibrant outdoor art scene for the first time or uncover aspects of a city you might already know. Through bodywork and imaginative practices, the workshop will introduce participants to instructions that they can take with them, back to their own cities and contexts and forward in their own creative work.

Sabine Zahn is an artist, researcher and educator, working with the fields of choreography, urban practice, aesthetics, the city as lived space and how they complement each other. Under the term Doing/City she explores a radical somatical physical angle towards space as produced through action. She works in close cooperation with other artists, such as Daniel Belasco Rogers and architects (such as architect collective raumlaborberlin) and conducted research in various cities around the world. She teaches increasingly at various universities (UdK, HZT, FU Berlin, KABK The Hague etc.) and recently completed a 3 yrs research fellowship with the DAS Arts Graduate School, AHK Amsterdam. photo: Constanze Flamme

stadterweitern.de

http://www.lovelabours.net/

Daniel Belasco Rogers is a performer and educator born in London but based in Berlin for over two decades. As part of the performance and fine art duo plan b, he has recorded every movement he makes with a GPS since 2003. Alongside commissions to make performance work for festivals and venues across Europe, plan b have made participatory multi-media work, audio walks, site specific performances and interventions. Between 2020 and 2023 he was a guest professor at Studium Generale at the UdK. After completing a Permaculture Design and Earth Activist training with Starhawk in 2023, his work has been increasingly concerned with ritual and earth based spirituality. He has collaborated with Sabine Zahn since working on Fremdgehen in 2019.

https://planbperformance.net