Touching Without Touch & Conditioning Creative Processes
SS 2020 / A 5-day workshop program by Dafna Maimon
Dafna Maimon will focus on our own creative (performative) process. As a starting point she set up a program and exercises that may birth an ongoing creative process as the main goal. She will use our time together to unleash things in ourselves, reflect and harness our creativity as opposed to immediately creating results to be placed in the outside world.
Dafna: “In this current moment of social distancing and lockdowns, I’m interested in the kinds of intimacy we experience with ourselves. As so many forms of distraction/ways of being have been taken away from us (or replaced by new forms), in a sense, our “performing” in the world is currently limited to very few eyes. We are mostly seen only by ourselves, family, partners, pets, roommates, or from the waist up on computer and phone screens. At least, in my case, I have found that this new form of existence has brought about a lot of new daily life movements/gestures/and even noises, that seem to be unusually ‘free’ or dare I say, ‘authentic’; almost akin to a child’s not-very-self-conscious behavior. So, I’m proposing that together, we engage in a research of being “intimate” with ourselves, and track these gestures, sensations, thoughts and movements into a score that could be performed, or given as instructions for a small audience over an online video conferencing platform. For our scoring process we will utilize the principles of the RSVP cycles, a scoring methodology developed by Anna and Lawrence Halprin. We will also involve the idea of the “greek choir”, and utilize our group/audience as active participants helping to bring the score to life. In this way the “final performance” of the score will also be collaborative and engage with the idea of social choreography in a moment where we can’t physically be close to one another.”