“When you “affect” something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn." (Brian Massumi)

Theme/focus
The research that led to the creation of the performance Surprised body project will ground the workshop. The Surprised body project is a dance project that focus on choreographic and compositional issues. In other projects, the physicality has been present, conceptually, on the same level, and with equivalent valor, with text, visual art, sound installations, use of objects, props and scenic elements. With the SBP, we focused on a research that saw the body, the movement and its relation with music and the space, as its central element.

Already as a title, Surprised body project defines a metaphorical space. The image of a body in a constant alert, escaping from a habitual daily body and from any kind of routine. The sense of “surprise” is intended as the inner state that allows us to “react” and respond, as individual and as a group. To affect each other, by any physical decision, also throughout structured improvisations and instant composition.

The workshop will be an occasion to search for specific qualities of disarticulated movement, layering the experience throughout several proposals and improvisations, challenging and intensifying the body awareness, by approaching the movement – avoiding tactics and routines
Throughout a structured score of exercises, that combines floor work, hands-on exercises, tai chi chuan and movement sequences, the physical training focuses, among other things, on:

- centering and gravity
- awakening the internal and external supports
- allowing isolation in the limbs and flow in the movement

Activating the center, as engine of the movement, we will aim in letting the movement cross freely, throughout the body.

The workshop, after a first part dedicated to ground the principals of the work, will articulate through a series of investigations on the movement and structured improvisations, intended as a conceptual, but also physical and mental challenge.

Movement materials will be transformed and de-structured in several ways. For example, a movement phrase will be treated as a spoken phrase, where the movements can be isolated as “words” and used to compose new phrases. The random in the phrase will be done by improvisations or composition, trying to use even small parts of movements of the original phrase as “syllables” to build new movements.

The teaching project “A surprised body” has been invited internationally in 41 countries (Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Albania, Republic of San Marino, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, UK, Holland, Austria, Finland, India, Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Spain, France, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, Lebanon, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda).