Workshop-Camp of Cheers for Fears in cooperation with Tanzhaus NRW
24. 24th & 25th October , 2020, each 11 a.m. to approx. 6 p.m. in Düsseldorf
Based on the principle that every actor in the performing arts – regardless of age or artistic or academic background – brings with them knowledge, skills and talents that are waiting to be shared, we developed the workshop camp in which all participants are teachers and learners at the same time: In one-and-a-half hour workshops, each participant had the opportunity to teach a certain aspect of their own artistic work and to share their own knowledge, and immediately afterwards, in the next workshop, to get to know the specialist knowledge and superhero skills of the other participants.
The actors were free to simply participate or to give an additional one-and-a-half-hour workshop. There was a small payment for workshop givers. The day was designed so that you could attend the other workshops before or after your own workshop. The workshops should deal with a topic close to the heart of the actors – and be limited to a specific aspect of their skills.
Impressions
(c) Sebastian Wolf
Bitte bequeme Kleidung mitbringen!
Thinking in motion
Katarína Marková/ MFK Bochum
In the workshop I would like to try out a part of our working practice with a larger group as a representative of the performer trio MFK. After- and of(f)-thinking processes about art, which are mostly practiced in a rigid sitting posture, we shift into a state of permanent physical activity, which is partly guided, partly copied. Little is spoken and much is moved. Please bring comfortable clothes! No special physical condition is required to participate.
MFK Bochum are Katarína Marková, Marlene Ruther and Franziska Schneeberger. The three of them constituted themselves in 2018 as a movement research group in the master’s program Scenic Research at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. They make performances on ball fields or institutional indoor spaces and in this sense have recently realized the joint exhibition/performance I was here at Kunsthaus Essen and HotDock in Bratislava. In the Cheers workshop we would like to share and try out an important part of our work practice, communication and thinking together in movement, with several people.
Do you still have them all together? Out of the head and into the moment
Sepiedeh Fazlali
We are constantly busy thinking about the past and planning for the future. A huge flood of information has to be processed. There are many small decisions we make every day that take up our resources. The thought wheel often leads a life of its own, continues to turn at night and does not let us rest. Many then consume even more from the outside, seeking distraction there to get relief. But we ourselves also bring a great treasure. In this workshop we want to stop, arrive in the moment, with what we have: our precious five senses.
Sepiedeh Fazlali is a cognitive and media scientist, educator, editor
and cultural educator. It critically examines issues of identity and culture, seeks to make people visible, promote social dialogue, open cultural access points, and thereby make a contribution to society.
How to create a solo in (less than) one hour
Hannah Krebs
In this workshop I would like to share with you my impro archive that I have accumulated over the years. From Susan Sontag’s No interpretation to Deborah Hay’s one-solo-a-day approaches, I’ve written many notebooks full of ideas and scores that I’m excited to share. The result is a practice with which anyone can develop a solo within one hour.
Hannah Krebs is a choreographer, dancer and performer. She studied at the Cologne Center for Contemporary Dance at the HfMT Cologne and at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. She currently works as a dancer for various companies/choreographers such as El Cuco Projekt, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Chikako Kaido and Ellen Söderhult. She also creates solos in collaboration with various media artists. In her last solo I know you can make it good she dealt with female socialization in the context of the climate crisis conflict.
How to create an Elvis Cover Song in (less than) one hour
Thomas Meckel
In this workshop we produce an Elvis cover song within one hour. Everyone joins in!
Thomas Meckel is a musician, curator and director. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and at the Studium Individuale in Lüneburg. He works as a director and dramaturge in the context of the Kölner Philharmonie, the improvisation lab Se Cure and on his own pieces together with Sebastian von der Heide, Elisa Kühnl and Simon Waskow, among others. Furthermore, he curates the concert series “Round” at the Kölner Philharmonie together with Tobias Thomas. In his current stage play “Solaris” he deals with collective improvisation processes in technological frameworks, as well as with novels by Ann Cotten and Stanislaw Lem.
How to spell wrong. A workshop to test a flawed writing practice.
Helen Brecht
An artistic process occurs precisely in the deviation from standardized ways of thinking and acting. But when we put our art into language – pitching it in emails, spreading it out in proposals, announcing it in program booklets – we have to subjugate ourselves to German spelling and comma placement in accordance with the rules. Anything else, would be embarrassing. In the workshop we will try out the taboo of German spelling. The point is not to construct errors, but to give them room to occur. The red curled line under our wörtetm we would like to meet here not with shame, but with curiosity. The workshop offers even hardliners of German spelling the opportunity to make their own mistakes through practices such as exergetic creeping dictation. The goal of the workshop is to de-individualize our spelling mistakes and bring texts to ortographic beauty in a collective process.
Helen Brecht is an expert on incorrect spelling practices. As early as elementary school, her teachers recognized her extraordinary talent for creatively subverting spelling and thus creating new linguistic creations. She studied at the Giessen Institute for Applied Theater Studies. works as a freelance author, dramaturge and performance artist in Cologne.
Help, an idea is haunting me! – The innovative format test
Claudia Saar
You have a piece idea that is still in the beginning stages? Looking for a title or a supporting marketing idea? A funding idea as well? The knot in the brain tightens, the thoughts circle. And now? Do you leave the brilliant idea to chance or to time? Together we try out newly conceptualized and combined creativity techniques from the Service Design Thinking toolbox. We play with Lego and Play-Doh and have fun with guided experimentation and making mistakes. We pave the way to the A-ha experience. Please bring: a question that requires new ideas.
Claudia Saar (KISD Cologne) is a service designer and cultural manager. As a concept tamer, she supports groups and cultural institutions in juggling ideas, finding and implementing innovative formats, whether analog or digital – whether for attracting visitors or developing content for an audience.
When in doubt, give it the benefit of the doubt. The productive power of procrastination in artistic processes
Julia Turbahn & Simone Weber
In economic, political, but also private systems in which man moves in the 21st century and which are defined by the time regime of acceleration, man should act as reflectively, quickly and effectively as possible. True to the motto: Just do it! In our view, procrastination unjustly has a negative connotation, especially in artistic work processes. In our workshop, we look at procrastination not as a weakness, but as a productive force. In addition to input on content, we share different strategies for finding new potential in the fine moments of the in-between in artistic work. We work primarily with movement scores, but are very interested in integrating other artistic disciplines (e.g. language, music).
Julia Keren Turbahn and Simone Gisela Weber met during their studies at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz Berlin. Since then, they have been jointly developing an ever-expanding artistic practice based on mutual exchange. Over the past five years, they have developed several collaborative works that explore text, everyday phenomena, and movement. In particular, their protracted project of a weekly correspondence influences their artistic collaboration, which can take many forms and temporalities.
Julia and Simone were inspired by the common fact of being two hesitant bodies. Fascinated by such qualities of private and everyday life, they become entangled within several choreographic works in the exploration of the hesitant body and its subversive power.
Moreover, they are convinced that by pursuing a theme in a sustained way and developing a shared way of working, they can unravel the poetics and power of their skills, desires, and artistic visions. Ideas take time to blossom and must go through several stages of exploration. For them, art needs time, needs space for hesitation. Repetition and contemplation as well as space for failure are essential creative strategies to evoke change and restructuring.
Impuls – Video & Concept
Kristine Tusiashvili
How do we get from concept to video? How do actors, space, video and photography meet? We will explore these questions in 90 minutes – starting from my video work, we will get into shooting ourselves and see how we install the filmed material in the space.
Kristine Tusiashvili works mainly on video installations, photography and performances. After studying art theory and history at the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, she studied photography and media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Essen (master student of Christiane Hantzsch).
Body and space
Miriam Arnold
In this workshop, we explore the surrounding space as a source of inspiration and playground for movement and physicality. Starting from the architectural possibilities of the individual body, we sound out the space between us and ourselves and the surrounding space. We may end up leaving the studio and using urban space as a playground for our physical research.
Miriam Arnold studied contemporary dance in Cologne and Istanbul and has since worked as a dancer, performer and dance mediator in NRW. Artistically, she moves at the intersection of dance, performance and visual arts and often seeks artistic exchange in collaborations with other artists. Again and again she poses the question of the relationship between art and politics.
Art Figures: Identity – Authorship – Agency
Mira Kandathil
Look at me and look at yourselves, and then think about whether you don’t all have a little bit of bearded woman in you.
Art figures can autonomously and subversively illuminate social power structures and reach a broad audience in the process. But how do they do it? How do artists translate complex content into the form of the art figure? The workshop will explore together the ways in which art figures embody and convey themes. Mira Kandathil will provide insights into the nature and workings of art figures. For this purpose, she presents her own art figures, experiences and results from her scientific research, her art and her life. The participants of the workshop will get to know the art figure as a possible mouthpiece for their own content. The aim of the workshop is to discover the potential of the art figure as an autonomous form of artistic expression that enables versatile and independent artistic work. The participants will work out how they can apply artistic strategies of art figures and transfer them to their own artistic work, as well as develop first approaches for their own art figures. The workshop is aimed at performing artists who want to be their artwork and performers who want to be authors of their work at the same time; and at all those who want to work artistically and create their own formats independently of external structures.
Mira Kandathil is an artist and scientist. She works as a writer, performer, director and researches with, through, about and as art figures. With her art figures, she appears in artistic and non-artistic contexts; sometimes as a guest lecturer/speaker at art colleges and scientific congresses, as the face of a theater festival, or soon as a budding influencer on virtual platforms like YouTube and TikTok. In her autoethnographic and artistic work she deals with identity, agency, authorship, stardom and the interference between art and science. She develops a new performative-ethnographic method, which she calls the “Performing Observation”. Kandathil studied acting and then Scenic Arts Practice (today: Expanded Theater) at the Bern University of the Arts, Social Anthropology at the University of Bern and is now doing a PhD on art figures at SINTA (University of Bern/HKB).
Her dissertation is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. As a doctoral candidate, she is working on an interdisciplinary research project on art figures at the HKB. In the duo “Follow Us (Kandathil/Machaz)” she realizes theater projects and performances together with the artist Annina Machaz about women* who influence her: such as historical figures from antiquity and pop culture, protagonists from literature and mythology and people from her environment. Follow Us showed their work for example at the Sophiensælen Berlin, the Gessnerallee Zurich or at ImPulsTanz Vienna. In addition, Kandathil also worked as a dramaturg and coach in artistic works and as an actress in municipal theater and cinema.
Mood Galery
Theresa Tripler
A painting experience with watercolors inspired by mindfulness of one’s own feelings and moods. Artistic and aesthetic expression from the inside out, having fun and leaving the end result entirely to the flow of water, paint and paper. Everything is there, let’s go and flow!
Theresa Tripler is a student in the master’s program Culture, Aesthetics, Media at the HHU Düsseldorf. Creative expression has always been part of her life – from dancing to painting to writing. In recent years, it has combined with her passion for mindfullness and meditation. Hence the approach: Every Mood is Gold. It is about a philosophy of life and art that assumes that everything is already present in us and it may all find expression. Art is diverse, so is the world, why not celebrate it all instead of trying to hide it or put it in boundaries.
Move it
Malin Harff
This workshop represents an attempt to work through our inner conflicts and thoughts physically and through movement. How does our nervous system react to movement and to moving thoughts in our body? Guided by the assumption that the way we appear in the world is shaped by what we carry with us in terms of thoughts and experiences, Move it represents an attempt to explore our inner life through the body. Specifically, the workshop consists of writing, partner and movement exercises. Move it is for you if you are interested in addressing the emotions, thoughts and memories that manifest in your body and nervous system.
Malin Harff studied performance arts and anthropology in Berlin, Freiburg and Amman. Artistically, she deals with issues of social interaction and the spaces that form it. Right now, Malin is researching the human nervous system using neuroscience approaches.
Poetized actions – from acting and decorating
Constantin Leonhard
We will start with a short physical warm-up. This is followed by a session with various tasks. First, the space will be manipulated by the workshop participants. One after the other. This task is slowly expanding Every action must now be performed with a certain quality. This is taken further and further to the extreme until the plot is barely recognizable and there is only ornamentation.
Constantin Leonhard (Schädle) born 1989 in Cologne, graduated with a Master Scenic Research and studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He conceives performances for urban and theatrical spaces. From his original work in the theater, Constantin Leonhard develops questions about the relationship between audience, spectator and space. Triggered by discourses on social hierarchies reflected in theater, he focuses on performance and video art as a means of expression. The extent to which artistic practice is a political process, what it does and what it works against and for, moves him in his current works, which are intended to open up a broad associative space in order to confront the viewer with his or her own views. As part of the collective ZOO he realizes works with means of documentary, installation and choreography. Collaborative experiments with contrary aesthetics and conventions, seek radical, poetic and quiet contradiction within the works of Kollektiv ZOO to renegotiate the relationship between political bodies, places and narratives.
.Dencuentro: Sorryless Celebration
Greta Salgado Kudras/ Amanda Romero
Amanda and Greta of the .Dencuentro dance collective would like to share movement footage from their new production, SINP’A. We will move through the different possibilities of encounter and confrontation that our bodies allow us and open spaces to celebrate this potentiality. The interweaving of movement understandings from contemporary dance and the Andean cultures in South America is in the foreground. It gets us moving and celebrating life.
.Dencuentro is a dance collective founded in 2018 by Constanza Ruiz, Greta Salgado and Amanda Romero. We three dancers come from South America and live in Cologne. We got to know each other during our dance studies in Cologne. After graduation, we became closer artistically through a shared interest in Tinku,a combat ritual from Bolivia. Our work is characterized in particular by the fact that we use the body as a medium of documentation. We traveled to Bolivia twice to physically experience the relationship between people and violence, people and festive cultures, people and nature, and people. Confronted with our own identities, we were on the one hand strangers in this place ourselves, and on the other hand connected to this region through our ancestors.
Im Workshop werden wir auf sprachliche wie körperliche Weise versuchen zu vermitteln, was wir in Bolivien erfahren haben und dafür die in den andischen Kulturen erlernten Bewegungen abstrahieren, dekonstruieren und neu zusammensetzen.
Dance and Movement meditation
Eva Herrmann
In this workshop we deal with the often overlooked body impulses. It is not about aesthetic movement, but about intuitively feeling what the body needs at the moment. Silence? Intensity? Close to the ground or hanging upside down? Through various exercises from acting, movement training and meditation we approach a free, spontaneous form of movement. Often, tensions are spontaneously released through the instinctive forms. Even repressed feelings can be perceived and released on a purely physical level in a protected space. To try and drop.
Eva Hermann studied acting at the Cologne Theater Academy. On stage she is interested in physical play, dance, performance and everything that is intense and clears the mind.
Wandering – a creative and intuitive exploration of the urban environment
Kathrin Golz
In the style of the Situationist International, we will embark on a tour of the urban surroundings of the Tanzhaus. The inspiration for artistic processes lies in the street, hides behind a wall, whispers monstrous things into our ear canal. Aisle – which way? We want to let chance rule and let ourselves drift. Bring a pen and notepad and arm yourself with rainproof garb in case of gloomy weather forecasts.
Kathrin Golz did her Master’s degree at HSD Düsseldorf in Culture, Aesthetics, Media with the final topic: Umherschweifen – eine psychogeographische Erkundung des urbanen Raums (Wandering – a psychogeographical exploration of urban space) and continues to work on the topic. She currently works as an assistant director at Theater der Keller.
What drives my counterpart to do what they do? The level of consciousness model – a socio/psychological meta-model
Michael Langenberger
How can I safely reach my counterpart with my message? How can my counterpart even understand what my concern is? But also: What does my counterpart really mean with his words?
The meta-model of low-conflict communication describes the evolutionarily developed mechanisms of our subconscious perception and action. It is here, far more often than in fact, that it is decided whether it is possible to work together with others without stress, to bring negotiations to a successful conclusion or even to lead performances to success. Just understanding this model opens one’s eyes to the view of others. Its practical use significantly improves the otherwise possible result.
Michael Langenberger has been working as a freelance business mediator and executive coach to resolve highly escalated conflicts for more than 10 years. For example, as a registered coach in the German Foreign Office and with medium and large companies. Most recently as Director of Sales at Johnson & Johnson, he has many years of leadership experience in healthcare and also as a project engineer for robotic testing equipment and in heavy industry. Besides sports, his special attention belongs to culture; here especially to dance and opera. He is currently one of the opera & ballet scouts at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf.
How can we inspire art and creative thinking? Social work practices
Frederike Sievers
Helping people to help themselves is the fundamental goal in social work. In the best case, social workers lead their clients on a path in which they themselves find the answers to their questions. But often it is not that simple. Some clients find it difficult to reflect on themselves or their situation – even when social workers ask specific questions. In my practice, I have found that a few creative methods can help clients understand their situation in a more accessible and positive way. For example, puzzles that stimulate divergent thinking can help people find different approaches to solving problems, broaden their view, and loosen entrenched thought patterns. In this way, clients learn to stimulate their creativity and face their challenges in everyday life. I would like to find out with you what role artists could play in social work and what impulses you can bring to the table that I have not even thought about before.
Frederike Sievers works as a social worker in Düsseldorf. After graduating in social work, she is currently studying for a master’s degree in culture, aesthetics, media at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. At first glance, the social worker’s job may not seem very creative or design-oriented. But it was social work in particular that made Frederike aware of the creative potential – of herself and others. Everyone is creative – the workshop is therefore an invitation to explore the question of how we can stimulate our own creativity and the creativity of others.
An event by Cheers for Fears and Tanzhaus NRW. Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW and the Kunststiftung NRW.
