Stories we tell ourselves.
by Varinia Canto Vila
The workshop is full-booked, but we can add you on a waitinglist. In case a place becomes available, this most probably will only be known last-minute and we can contact you only then.
To be added to the waitinglist, write to info@tictacartcentre and please mention your name, email address, whatsapp number and the city where you will have to travel from.
In collaboration with Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods, Tictac Art Centre programs a workshop in which Varinia Canto Vila (who has worked with Meg Stuart over an extended time in various creations) revisits the archive of Damaged Goods.
About the workshop:
This workshop revisits movement ideas, -worlds and dimensions I was invited to develop in Meg Stuart’s work. Rather than practicing these as scores or techniques, we practice with an awareness that something else is always happening simultaneously, something bigger – even while we do not try to make it happen. In the workshop we will look at fiction as a tool to create a place for our investigations. We will talk to ourselves while moving, like children playing with imaginary toys, and make noises, as if we were creating soundtracks for movies produced on the spot. We may end up dancing like we’re alone. Emotions will inform the temperature of our involvement. We might veer into pathos, but always through a thorough search for sensibility, content and knowledge.
I have participated in several of Meg Stuart’s creations: Highway 101 (2000), Soft Wear (2000), VIOLET (2011) and confirm humanity (2022). For VIOLET, the proposition was to create a choreography that would function in the same way as alchemy. We investigate and develop movement, as if we have injected our bodies with new properties that allow us to transform and travel through other states of being. Similarly, in this workshop we will explore whether movement can take us to different dimensions – spatial, mental or temporal – and how this influences our experience of the here and now. But instead of a scientific approach, we nourish a personal and spiritual journey into what it means to dance, to move and be moved at the same time.
Biography:
Varinia Canto Vila (Santiago de Chile, 1976) is a dancer, choreographer and movement researcher. In her choreographic work, she has explored medium-based themes: three-dimensionality aspect of the body on the stage (No Title, 2008); finitude of space (Beast, 2008); intention and desire as manifestation of self-reflexivity in the dancing body (During Beginning Ending, 2010); materiality of body and things to generate an haptic vision (by getting one’s hands dirty, 2017). Lately, Canto Vila is exploring political dimensions of the body and notions of extended choreography and organization of movement of the social body: about socio-relational worlds in the context of chilean reality (MUNDOS, 2022); The relationship between law and movement in ongoing research; and a stage piece around the notions of geometrical v/s topological space as a metaphor for the way ideology and ways of thinking creates distances and proximities between people and their worlds (Maneras de Salir, 2023).
Canto Vila graduated as a dancer from Universidad de Chile, and from P.A.R.T.S in 1999. In 2014, she graduated with an MA in Art & Politics from the London Goldsmiths University. In 2017 she completed a post-graduate degree in a.pass (Advanced Performance And Scenography Studies), in Brussels, in which she developed performative and video work. Canto Vila collaborated with various artists and choreographers from the independent dance/performance scene in Brussels where she lived for 24 years: Claire Croizé, Marcos Simoes, Mette Edvardsen, Thomas Steyaert and Raul Maia. She collaborated with Meg Stuart on Highway 101 (2000), VIOLET (2011), The Matter lab (2021), and Confirm Humanity (2022). In 2019 Canto Vila co-created BUSCANDO A MEG with Ale Miller, Francisca Espinoza and Paulina Vielma, in Chile; and in 2021, co-created NAMING FICTION with Quindell Orton. In 2022 was invited by Moriah Evans to work in Restos and later on in Remains Persist. Currently she is working and living in Chile.
Dates:
Monday till Friday
11th – 15th September
Times:
9:30 – 13:30
Price:
200 €
Registration fee of 80 € (as part of the 200 €).
* Biography of Meg Stuart – Damaged Goods:
MEG STUART is a choreographer, director and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company, Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, ranging from solos and duets such as BLESSED (2007) and Hunter (2014) to large-scale choreographies such as VIOLET (2011) and CASCADE (2021), video works, site-specific creations like Projecting [Space[ (2017-2019), and improvisation projects such as City Lights (2016). Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theater and visual arts, driven by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines. Through fictions and shifting narrative layers, she explores dance as a source of healing and a way to transform the social fabric. Improvisation is an important part of Stuart’s practice, as a strategy to move from physical and emotional states or the memory of them. She passes down her knowledge through regular workshops and master classes in- and outside of the studio. Meg Stuart received several awards in recognition of her oeuvre, among which the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018. www.damagedgoods.be
