April 22nd to 26th, 2024 – 9:30 am to 12:30 pm (Mon.-Fri.)
Full week rate : $85
Drop-in class rate : $25 – Only on Monday and/or Tuesday (available one month prior)
Language of instruction : English and French
Questions can also be asked in : English and French
Open to artists of all disciplines
The mask could be mandatory for some activities as an accessibility measure for our teachers or participants. For more information, click here.
CONTENT
This workshop is about practicing dance improvisation, and writing, as forms of invocation.
Let’s say that “invocation” means: to summon what is not visible, make it appear, and make it felt. In this workshop we are doing half real magic and half fake magic. In part spell-casting or other-realm-channeling, in part just a dance, in part just a text. We are both playfully and seriously practicing something in between: a quality of attention. Invocation is a way to resist making sense and move towards intuitive knowing to create spontaneous compositions with their own internal logic.
In this workshop we will practice scores that orient us to ourselves, to one another, and to our environment. In doing so we will experience, simultaneously, an empowering expansion beyond the self, and a means to look within the self. The workshop is physical, playful and contemplative at once. People can write in the language of their choice.
Many scores in this workshops were borrowed, adapted from, or inspired by the pedagogical practices of Alix Enaudi, Alice Chaucaht, and Maria F. Scaroni. Some scores in the workshops were invented by Lara.
ACCESSIBILITY
The content of the workshop can be adapted by the participants to suit their physical and emotional ability. Several of the scores involve physical contact. Physical contact can always be modified.
BIOGRAPHY
Lara Oundjian is an interdisciplinary dance artist based in Montréal/Tiotià:ke. She trained in contemporary dance, choreography, somatic practices and practiced-based theory in various contexts of Berlin, Stockholm and Montreal. She has presented her work in Montreal at the OFFTA, Tangente, and the Phenomena festival, Summerworks, and Lots of Love. Lara was a resident artist with the Third Floor at Usine C from 2019-2021 and at La Serre from 2020-2021. Lara approaches dance as a practice of relationality, the body as dynamically entangled with its environment through attention and sensation. She researches practices of transmission between internal and external spaces. She is busy with various kinds of feminist embodied emancipation, and nerding out about both performativity and dancing.