Hearing Voices 

22nd Oct 2021 5:00pm-8:00pm 

A performance workshop on practices of listening with choreographers Catalina Insignares and Carolina Mendonça

Hosted by Techne students Georg Doecker and Jonas Schnor

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hearing-voices-tickets-170637981797

 

Workshop description:

In this online workshop, we will engage in the idea of “hearing voices” in performance: the listening to audible (and inaudible) voices that never come as one: birds, philosophers, sirens. Choirs, crowds, and the dead.

The event takes its cue from Catalina Insignares (CO/FR) and Carolina Mendonça’s (BR/BE) joint choreographic practice. Having met during their MA studies in Choreography and Performance at Giessen University in 2014, Insignares and Mendonça have since been collaborating and maintaining a complicity in different manners of working together. Their work finds its soil in workshops and seminars – moments where they can feel and think together with others: reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses, and massages populate these encounters. The body and the extra-sensorial have become their central tools.

The workshop will be composed of presentations (20-30 mins each) by Mendonça and Insignares as well as Techne students and hosts Jonas Schnor and Georg Doecker. In between presentations, there will be space for collective enquiry and questioning. We aim to create a fluid structure where presentations, practices, and discussions weave together in a participatory mode of voicing and listening.

The overall aim of the workshop is to add to the ongoing performative and theoretical investigation into the act of listening, deep listening, and (non-)human voices that complicate subjectivity, history, and narrative. The offering is designed for practitioners and students from drama, theatre, performance, and dance, and anyone interested in issues around voice, listening, awareness, and attentiveness. If you are interested in joining us, please register via the eventbrite link. The event takes place on Zoom.

The workshop is open to 20 participants in total. A zoom link will be distributed prior to the event.

 

Biographies:

Carolina Mendonça, based in Brussels, works with dance, theatre, and visual arts, allowing for a cross-pollination of knowledge and an openness towards different logics. She graduated in Performing Arts at ECA-USP in São Paulo and attained a Master in Choreography and Performance at Giessen University in Germany with a DAAD Scholarship. Carolina has collaborated with artists such as Catalina Insignares, Dudu Quintanilha, Volmir Cordeiro and Marcelo Evelin and has presented work at festivals such as Kyoto Experiment, Festival d`Automnne, Tanz in August, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and Impulztanz, among others.

Catalina Insignares, born in Bogota and based in Paris. As a choreographer, she’s looking for that moment when dance, touch and movement generate unintelligible, unapologetic, what-ever-like subjectivities and collectivities. Her work is mainly built through collaborations for staging, dramaturgy and performing. Since 2015 she develops a one-to-one dance piece and long-term practice titled us as a useless duet. In 2018, together with Carolina Mendonça she creates a work involving a night reading directed to sleeping bodies and titled useless land, created in the Franziskaner Klosterruine in Berlin and reactivated in Beursschouwburg (Brussels), MärzMusik (Berlin), La ferme du buisson (Paris), MNT (Bucharest) among others. Since 2017 she works with choreographer Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer in her immersive works, but also in a collaboration (La Facultad) addressed to people in exile and that experiments with other forms of relationship to oneself, to others and to our social environment. Since 2018, she has started a research on how to use the sensorial and fictional means of dance to communicate with the dead (ese muerto se lo cargo yo).  Both these works weave together in her investigation in the research programme THIRD at DAS School in Amsterdam.

Jonas Schnor is a dramaturge and PhD student at the Centre for Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey. Jonas has collaborated with artists and performance collectives such as Marcelo Evelin (BR), Catarina Vieira (PT), Bravo Toga (SE), and Sisters Academy (DK) and has served as a guest dramaturge at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, Das Arts and the Mime School in Amsterdam. Working in the intersection between philosophy and performance, Jonas is preoccupied with situations where thought and activity, imagination and tactility, converge artistically. In his PhD research, he is developing an embodied mode of philosophical research in order to investigate how imperceptible affects and actions in performance processes become perceptible in and as artistic events. For his PhD studies he is the recipient of stipends from the University of Surrey and the Techne Consortium.

Georg Doecker is a PhD student from the School of Arts, University of Roehampton, London. In his PhD entitled “Practice, an Exercise in Living,” he investigates practice in its contemporary formation as a particular and particularly dominant tendency of early 21st century theatre, dance, and performance in Europe. From 2015-2018, Georg was a researcher for the research project “Theatre as Dispositif,” Giessen University, Germany, which was funded by the German Research Foundation. Georg’s essays, articles, and book chapters have been published in English and German magazines, peer-reviewed journals, and anthologies from theatre, dance, and performance studies. His PhD studies are kindly supported by the University of Roehampton and Techne Consortium.