Circus Dance Practices#1
Contemporary circus and dance are physical practices that influence and inspire each other in artistic dialogue. Both disciplines share intensive physical training, high body awareness and various practices of presence as common ground. However, contemporary circus and dance open up very different perspectives in their approach to space, objects, risk, rhythm, musicality, improvisation and choreographic processes.
Circus Dance Practices#1 is one of the festival's new Campus projects. In cooperation with the CircusDanceFestival, the Centre for Contemporary Dance / University for Music and Dance Cologne is initiating a several-week-long artistic practice research project. An internationally working circus artist is invited to work with BA Dance students to conduct practice-oriented research into questions of technique and intuition, as well as choreographic setting and improvisational openness. The focus is on physical research, experimental working methods and the joint testing of laboratory, creation and improvisation tools. How does artistic material emerge from the coexistence and juxtaposition of dance and circus? How does practice become bodily knowledge – and bodily knowledge become practice again?
In the first year of this new series of Circus Dance Practices, French juggler and performer Guillaume Martinet from Compagnie Defracto shares his artistic circus practice with students. In intensive practical laboratory sessions, he introduces the company's working methods, in which juggling is understood as a physical relationship with the object and oscillates between technical precision and playful abandon. He teaches object- and body-related movement principles, varying rhythm, dynamics and improvisational tasks. This creates a shared space for exploration between dance and object manipulation. Technical exercises, improvisation and compositional approaches intertwine, giving students the opportunity to develop completely new qualities of movement in the interplay between body and object and to gain insights into the creative processes of Defracto.