SWITCH - POST FAILURE POTENTIAL

Saturday 18 - Sunday 19 May - Cost: £80
email Rob at wainsgatedances@gmail.com to book

Through our ongoing dance research of queer love centered survival practices this workshop is a re-entry into the question "What can we do together that we cannot do alone?"
What if inviting otherness/queerness can give us the space necessary to find, decide, construct, destroy, reinvent, and take-on expanding ways of being and inhabiting the multiplicity of you,
me, and we?
We will work with falling into failure onwards from failure into the beginning, radical solo body readiness, discerning risk-taking, soft disoriented expansiveness, ways of being tethered, holding/beholding/being held, searching for that which is delicious, loverhood, endurance practices, getting lost, switching, touch, celebrating, and more.
We will keep re-inventing ways to be wet and pleased. We will build skills for navigating around that which has potential to be fatal. We invite you to take a journey with us — of falling in love —that changes us in ways that might give us more capacity in the world.
What is possible when love is stronger than fear?
We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex `realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with one another. This will be a queer, trans, and BIPoC centered space.
Through our intersectional identities, we will draw on practices of the basic fundamentals of Traditional Northern Style Kung Fu Chinese Martial Arts, contact improvisation, improvisation, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Feldenkrais®, dance making, activism and how these ideologies can be implemented in our dancing bodies.
The workshop will be taught in spoken English and is open to all levels and abilities. There will be durational scored improvisational dancing practices that include physical contact, disorientation, momentum, impact, and resting. This workshop will train our reflexes, developing fast decision making and utilizing how to move with more understanding of how the floor/environment can support us. There will also be options/adaptations as needed.
The research material also includes building skills and practices of agency, consent, touch, positionality, generosity, endurance, risk-taking, decision-making, and collaboration. We will develop our individual and collective capacity through dancing and verbal discussion. Let’s deeply sensitize and activate our dancing capacities as humans from many different orientations.
Let’s keep finding strategies to be softly hardcore.
We will DANCE.
Bios:
Makisig Akin (they/them)
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses
on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. I have taught dance workshops and Contact Improvisation classes in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, Bennington College, The Field Center, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. My orientation to CI is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I received an MFA from UCLA in 2019. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I am the co-creator and co-director of Emerging Change Tanzfestival in Berlin, Germany. In the last three years my choreographic work has been presented in Tanzfabrik Bühne, Uferstudios, DOCK 11, Movement Research at the Judson, What You See Festival, OUTsider Fest, Tanztage Berlin, among others. My works have been supported by NEUSTART KULTUR Fonds Darstellende Künste, Distanzen in 2022/2023, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and Fonds Darstellende Künste Flausen.
www.makisigakin.com
Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer white person, I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Collaboration, questioning, and deep physicality are central to all of my work. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers. Our work has recently been produced by DOCK 11, Tanzfabrik Berlin Bühne, Tanztage Berlin, Movement Research at the Judson, OUTsider Fest, and What You See Festival. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen
Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Metamorphosis Improvisation Research Festival, The Field Center,
BeingTouch, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder, earned an MFA from University of California San Diego, and am trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under Elizabeth Beringer.
www.anyacloud.com