Moving the Nomadic Body
How do I structure the map of my ephemeral physical space-time?
Movement and language create space. They create time.
The entanglement of imagination and language in our bodies creates kinetic representations.
‘Moving the nomadic body’ applies movement and choreography as tools of critical thinking, awareness, and political action.
It it a workshop of kinetic composition in which the body moves in the real and the imaginary, while choosing to influence and get influenced.
The body is characterized as a complex entity. The body creates spaces and this is expressed by its performativity in space.
Following the feminist geographer Massey, the workshop activates the three notions of space: discursive - imaginary - corporeal and aims to build new maps.
The workshop offers a different way of interacting with the written words and the reasoning space. How our body, by choosing to reject the hierarchy of the mind in understanding language, can perceive and move language differently?
The more sensitive the body is in its ‘ relational representations’, the more power has to act and inform space as a practice of possibilities, shaped by continuous representations and effects of self and other material relations.
The term ‘nomadic body’ has been influenced by the theory of nomadic subjectivity (Deleuze, Guattari, 1985) by stating free thought that travels away from domination and categorization. A nomadic body that perceives the ‘worn standard notions of hegemony’ and moves away from passivity and stagnation.
| Dance Practitioner |
Bodies As Garden
The educational- artistic project is based on experiential learning through organic movement. It is an inter-generational movement workshop called “Bodies as Garden” for children (5-7 ys old), teenagers and seniors 65+.
It had been co designed and co facilitated by 3 individuals practitioners, Sonia Ntova, Maria Papadopoulou, Maria Karavakou. They did not know each other but they let time and curiosity lead to their collaboration.
Bodies have been conceived as a garden - the three groups functioned as garden- patterns: they act independently while they co-create and interact with ideas that infuse the garden and its care, exploring the self, the environment, and symbiosis.
The workshop had 3 themes:
Exploring the Self
Exploring the Environment
Exploring the Symbiosis
Permaculture as a practice gave the methodology of slow time, observation, care. Initially in the collaboration between the 3 dance practitioners and then its application in the laboratories.
The dance practitioners were occupied by the question:
How can observation and care as practices of movement, bring awareness to both the body and nature?
And
How can society as a whole, with all its diversity, be empowered through collective embodied processes?
The laboratories were about active participation through embodied experience. The educators wanted to strengthen social relationships between the different age groups as a productive exchange between generations, and to perceive them as a non-waste interaction while creating connections between movement and ecology.
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Dance practitioners/ Facilitators:
Maria Papadopoulou:
Sonia Ntova:
Vera Karavakou:
Fotos:
Nikos Plevris, Andreas Mavroidis, Thodoris Pistiolas, Sonia Ntova, Anthi Mouriadou
In the frame of the program ‘MOVING GROUND’, under the theme of "Dance and Permaculture".
Held by Duncan Dance Center.
With the support of the municipality of Vyronas
With the financially support of Greek Ministry of Culture
Co organized and co produced by Εuropean Dancehouse Network