Guy Cools | Workshop “Who needs a dance dramaturg: dance dramaturgy as a dialogical practice”

“The generosity and openness of Guy Cools made this workshop even more rich and informative: we were thinking together” (Evaluation of a participant)
The underlying idea of the workshop is that as a choreographer you don’t necessarily need a dramaturg but you should develop your own dramaturgical reflection on your artistic practice.
The workshop will offer participants practical tools and exercises to reflect upon, to evaluate and eventually to transform their creative process. Using the cross, circle and labyrinth as graphic symbols, the participants will discuss the essential polarities of the creative process: perception, formation, intuition, experience. Through practical and physical exercises the workshop will explore how dramaturgy/the dramaturg can contribute to this process as witness, dialogue partner and ‘editor’. The group will focus in particular on dramaturgy as a dialogical practice and ways to organise and support this dialogue. The final goal of the workshop is to gain a different, renewed perspective of one’s own creative and choreographic process and methodologies through discovering the diversity of practices of the other participants.

Guy Cools (BE/CA) is a Belgian dance dramaturg. He worked amongst others with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Christopher House (CAN), Akram Khan (UK), Andrea Nann (CAN) (www.guycools.com). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice Rewriting Distance (www.rewritingdistance.com). His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). From December 2022, he is full time professor in the dance department of UQAM, Montréal.

Guy Cools (BE/CA) is a Belgian dance dramaturg. He worked amongst others with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Christopher House (CAN), Akram Khan (UK), Andrea Nann (CAN) (www.guycools.com). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice Rewriting Distance (www.rewritingdistance.com). His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). From December 2022, he is full time professor in the dance department of UQAM, Montréal.

More about Guy Cools: https://www.guycools.com/