Sri Louise and Juliana Coles, coaching project: Dance Journal – The fusing of Yoga, Visual Journaling and Performance.

My last week at ImPulsTanz.
I couldn’t have been happier than with this workshop being my last at the ImPulsTanz Festival. The Coles sisters (yes, they are sisters, but Louise has renamed herself Sri) were amazing. And professional – and that’s not always a given when talking about ImPulsTanz teachers. Juliana Coles is literally the pioneer of Extreme Journaling, and Sri Louise is just such a guru. What we did:
In the morning we practiced yoga for a couple of hours before moving into the visual journal making, and at the end of the day we would “take it into the space” (ah, dance expressions!). It was one of the most engrossing courses I attended at the festival and I can not imagine a better finale.

Above is one of the journal pages I made. But you can see Juliana’s much more impressive work here or at her flickr account.

That was it for my danceWEB residency at ImPulsTanz 2009. Looking back at the good times, hard times, intense times, naked times – it all kind of felt like stepping into a parallel universe for five weeks. Definitely a recommendable experience.

Maguy Marin, coaching project: “entrer en scene” / “entering the stage”

Maguy Marin: The Pina Bausch of France, as a friend phrased it so well. Working with her was fun, hard, challenging, demanding, testing, difficult, tough, weird – in other words: not easy. Especially, not, if you were one of the unlucky ones that couldn’t follow where Maguy was getting at, which some people just couldn’t or didn’t want to, as this made her very tired. Although every day she’d return with new energy. So, not only did I learn about ‘entering the stage’ and the internal event of this, but also communication – or lack of. Interesting mix.

Maguy introduced us to the way she works with her company, which she apparently does in a very particular manner: most of the tasks, we would carry out one by one in front of every one else. And since we were 22 people in the class, one task would take maybe 2 days in the studio. It could have been a very unpleasant experience (I’m sure it was for some), but actually it was fascinating how we would grow with the task, and the task with us – it was a journey, and even though we only spent 10 min. on stage each, every attempt to contribute well to this research was part of a mutual development and understanding of the task as an issue. Digging so deep into one specific thing was sometimes tiresome, but it’s a great ability to posses. I think this is evident in Maguy’s work, as well.

This picture is from an exercise where we had to dress up and then… wait. Wait. Just wait for the character to arrive and the transformation to take place without force or anticipation. A piece of cake for Maguy during her demonstration – not quite as easy for the rest of us. But as she said: we were there to fail. (Which we did)