LAP DANCE / PRIVATE DANCE

I have been fascinated by Lap Dance and what it has to offer contemporary performance since 2009. I approach the form as a microstructure to study the phenomenon of live art, and the potential of communication and exchange between performer and audience.

Lap Dance is highly sexualized according to commercial aesthetics and semiotics of sex and femininity. It can be discussed as a formalization of a semiotic body where gestures, movements, codes, and symbols of femininity are made use of to achieve a performed sexuality. As art and commercial entertainment are continuously melting into each other, I believe there is great potential to analyze, research, appropriate, and deconstruct such forms of entertainment. Please note that it is not my interest to question lap dance nor its implications, but rather to provoke the questions which lap dance can propose to performance, as well as to an audience regarding the economy and politics of privacy, intimacy, and the very organization of body and space in live art.

In this intensive, Lap Dance is appropriated and used as a microstructure to practically study choreographic and performance issues revolving around distance, touch, atmosphere, relation to sound, presence, presentation, eye gazing, and breath matching. It would be my intention that an intensive concludes with a presentation.

STRATEGY FOR COMBINING TEXT AND MOVEMENT

This intensive will get sweaty and loud, it will get creepy and glorious, delicious and un-nerving. A big part of my artistic practice is concerned with the potential dimensions of combining text and movement, and how uncanny juxtapositions between physicality, voice and textual content function to bring about a complexity of poetics in the eye of the viewer. Every day will begin with an intense physical and vocal preparation followed by practices to introduce my strategies for combining text and movement. Each student will develop monologue material with a strategic combination of voice and physical quality. The main objective of this intensive is not only that students gain practical experience developing text and movement combinations, but also to inspire their own practice, research and development of strategies in this area. It would be my intention that an intensive concludes with a presentation.