WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

In this workshop, Matthias Sperling and Katye Coe share elements of No-How Generator, a body of research and a choreographic work, created by Matthias in collaboration with Katye.

No-How Generator embarks from the question: If knowledge-generation is a fundamentally embodied process, can we see and experience it happening in a dance performance?

The work explores generative potentials in dance experiences and how these relate to knowledge-generation as an embodied process of conjuring.

Grounded in experiences of learning-through-moving in dance, this work understands our bodily capacities for knowing as a meshwork that spans the ‘scientific’ (rational, languaged, explicit) and the ‘magical’ (more-than-rational, felt sense, intuitive).

We will work with score-based materials that activate taking a reading of our experience while/as dancing, drawing on influences including the choreographer Deborah Hay’s orientation toward ‘learning without thinking’ from ‘my whole body as my teacher’.

Many of the materials invest in working with momentum and perception at the same time: inviting a setting in motion of not only our mass but also our ways of knowing, sensing and relating. Some of the materials take pleasure in working with loosely repeating or rhythmic motion as a generative form, some also include potentials for working in contact with others.

The materials offer specific and multi-layered parameters, and the invitation is for participants to unfurl their own curiosities and appetites through them.