JONATHAN BURROWS & MATTEO FARGION WORKSHOP
18th-20th April 11-6 £150
We are very pleased indeed to be having Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion back at Wainsgate. The last workshop they taught brought a brilliant and varied group of people together to work with some deliciously complex/simple/generative scores, structures to create things alongside each other. The materials they bring are distilled from many years of practice, and are offered with warmth humour and lightness.
We keep hearing from people that came, how the workshop has been a real inspiration for their ongoing practice, with some creating new work as a direct development of the workshop.
It’s rare to get to work in this way with these two brilliant people and artists in the UK, so come and join for what will be 3 stimulating days very well spent.
This then that
Burrows & Fargion
Composer Matteo Fargion and choreographer Jonathan Burrows share a week-long workshop looking at questions of how to balance the many and overlapping elements at play in the making of a performance, including concept, context, image, form, dramaturgy, materials and daily practice.
The workshop will be a mixture of practical work and discussion, with the aim of allowing each person to re-examine how they approach their own work.
The mornings will be facilitated by Fargion with a focus on composition, and
Burrows will lead the afternoon concentrating more on dramaturgy and performance.
The workshop is open to anybody interested in performance: no specific skills needed.
Choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion have been collaborating for over 35 years, creating an internationally acclaimed body of duet work including Both Sitting Duet (2002), The Quiet Dance (2005), Speaking Dance (2006), Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece (2009), Body Not Fit For Purpose (2014), Rewriting (2021) and The Unison Piece (2025).
Fargion has also written music for many other performance makers including Helga Arnalds, Claire Croizé, Siobhan Davies, Mette Edvardsen, Karl Jay-Lewin and Andrea Spreafico.
Burrows is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010/2025) and Writing Dance (Varamo Press, 2022), and is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research Coventry University.
“They’re nerdy, they’re funny, they’re euphoric; they carry out their score with the unpretentious, effortful efficiency of Dad getting the canoe to stay on top of the car. It seems a particularly English humor – small, quick, self-deprecating, though essentially unembarrassed – and it is a welcome companion to the seriousness of formal investigation. It is rare to find a post-modern sensibility as effervescent and as homely as Burrows’ and Fargion’s… at that kind of thing, they are simply the best.”
The Berliner