STOP EMULATING A CADAVER
w/ ABBY CRAIN & LAYTON LACHMAN

The good news is that we aren’t dead. The good news is that our humanness is comprised of primarily nonhuman specific components. The question then arises as to why movement studies is still obsessed with kinesiological compliance that is based primarily on human cadaver study. This week let’s not comply. Let’s interrogate our nonhumaness and dance from our swim bladders instead. What is a swim bladder, you may ask…it has to do with fish and nonhumans and breath. Let’s stop pretending that science is actually able to explain the mystery and magic of the moving body and see what happens.

In this week long lab, morning practice will be strongly rooted in Open Source Forms, the non-anatomically defined wild stepchild of Skinner Releasing. Open Source Forms invites us into unfettered and unpredictable whole body movement through a series of experiential images and practices. We become windstorms; we grow tentacles on our limbs; we compose ourselves of smoke.

Afternoons will be structured in a variety of ways including discussions, writing, research, and dancing together. These various structures will focus on experiential knowledge production, collective creation, and strategies for de-centering determinist movement teleologies. We will author and co-author imaginative movement scores and soak in them. We will see imagination as a continuous practice which suggests that the whole body can follow completely new patterns and associations.

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Abby Crain is a Bay Area based artist who makes dances and other structures for performance. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented in New York City, Liverpool, Chicago, Cork, Berlin, Portland and Los Angeles. She also works in the field as a teacher and performer. As a performer she has worked primarily with MiguelGutierrez and the Powerful People and Sara Shelton Mann, with appearances in the work of Kathleen Hermesdorf, Jesse Hewit, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Jess Curtis Gravity. Teaching credits include FRESH Festival, Ponderosa Tanzland (DE), Movement Research, and Mills College. Current research includes creativepractices to undermine the telios of anthropocentric and cadaver based anatomical theory on the moving body.

abby-crain.com
laytonlachman.com

Layton Lachman is a dance artist. She creates choreographic works, hosts events and performs as a freelance artist. Layton was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for seven years, collaborating primarily with Mara Poliak, Abby Crain, Samuel Hertz, and SALTA, as well as appearing in the works of Sara Shelton Mann, Jess Curtis, and Kathleen Hermesdorf among others. Lachman is currently a Berlin-based artist, although continues to be engaged in artistic collaborations, curation, and social organizing projects located in the USA. Her research is often in the realm of somatics and the application of these experiential practices in the creation of immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation. In addition to somatic research as choreographic methodology, Layton teaches composition and improvisation in university contexts, with recent guest lecturing positions at Beloit College, Ohio University, and Liverpool John Moores University. Inspired by Abby, during 2018/2019 Layton is in intensive training with Stephanie Skura and Susanna Hood to also become an Open Source Forms facilitator.

Dates: July 23rd-27th
Hours: 10-12:30
1:30-3:30
Where: Dock 11 – EDEN STUDIOS – Pankow
Workshop Fee: $200 – register by July 1st
$225 – register after July 1st

contact laytonlachman@gmail.com to register or if you have any questions.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1934989003187044/

Dock link: http://www.dock11-berlin.de/index.php/cat/2_3/id/p611_STOP-EMULATING-A-CADAVER-.html