CARING WITH - sensitizing oneself towards gravity

As a dancer, artist, researcher and educator I am interested in our body ́s innate ability to respond physically to the environment, and the surprisingly ways we create relational matrices by composing our bodies in and with space.

 I wish to propose a practice of Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity. Caring with in the attendance to others, with asymmetry of touch, friction, senses, and smells, caring with inside the unequal, messy and troubled situations. Caring with as deep listening. 

 

Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity is about proposing an embodied multisensory affectively and politically targeted way of knowing, grounded in sensitizing oneself to each other and the “more than human” sentience, by asking: what modes of attention and practices of attunement can bring us into responsible relationships?

 Gravity is our constant companion, and it is a force we all have in common as humans and non-human on this planet earth. Through playful and challenging guided explorations, we will work with sensing where the direction for down is by: letting gravity inform our bodies. You will get tools to move on your own, and tools for being in physical contact with others. We will practice the art of falling and failing, catching our self and each other, flying, rolling, sliding, balancing, disorientation, awkwardness, spiraling, weight sharing, counterbalance, being in the unknown and much more.   

"You been swimming in gravity since the day you were born. Every cell knows where down is. Easily forgotten. Your mass and the earths mass calling to each other.” Steve Paxton

Foto: Patrick Beelaert

 
En workshop i samarbete med Dansalliansen, Danscentrum Stockholm, PRODA och Dansehallerne med stöd av Nordisk kulturfond.

Dorte Bjerre Jensens work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through movement, manifested as performance, participatory performative scores, live art installations, lectures, classes and workshops, and writing. Dorte have been practicing, teaching and performing contact improvisation for more than 20 years.

From 2019-2022, she was a part of the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. As part of EER, she performed the piece Sharing Perspectives (SP) at Tate Modern London. SP that is grounded within the practice of contact improvisation and score design, gave a rare insight into the world of the other by embodying another person’s perspective. As ways to navigate the pandemic, she developed the performative scores, Greeting Cards (2020), which questioned and redefined the choreographed gesture greeting; and INviteME Online (2021), which invited participants to reconnect to their private spaces, plants, and each other. She publishes these collaborations in both artistic and scientific books and journals.

Her latest work Cluster of Forces, a hybrid between interactive installation and performance investigates everything is in flux, including our ability to survive! We are always already deeply connected to each other and the more-than-human through touch, fragrances and frequencies. It messes with the genius solo-artist and the interdependency of life and work, a feminist-materialist aesthetics of production. www.dortebjerrejensen.dk

 

Article Sharing Perspectives: