Inclusive Workshops on Saturday

laGeste expands its intergenerational practice to Inclusive Workshops on a permanent basis. We organise open workshops for people with visible and invisible disabilities, people with and without (dance) experience and people with plenty of enthusiasm and body positivity. Age, body mass index, gender, religion, they are all allowed to play along, there must be diversity, disability leads to creativity.

Kwint Manshoven coordinates the inclusive operation, next to his practice as a dancer & choreographer.

This season 22-23, we will divide the workshops into several series.

Each series will last several Saturdays and will have a fixed choreographer and participant group. The different choreographers will each bring their individuality and a theme of their own choice.
Each series will work towards a private presentation moment.
The day of the presentation moment will always end with a Thé Dansant, during which we will open the doors of Atelier laGeste to all interested parties.

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Choreographers for series 1 of season '22/'23 are Fanny Vandesande and Anna Dujardin.
Both are associated with Platform K. Fanny as a dancer-movement coach and Anna as a dancer-in-training. Together they are walking a research path to eventually arrive at a dance performance (duet or solo).
The theme of their performance is sexuality, in its broad sense. In their research, they developed a kind of methodology in which they arrive at movement from word and image. Their wish is to try out that methodology with different people, different bodies.

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For series 2, we are working with Tijen Lawton. She intends to start from her rich practice as a performer (with Pierre Droulers, Needcompany, Claudio Bernardo, Mauro Paccagnella, Marco Torrice, and others. )

"My unending hunger as a professional dancer & performer to continuously learn and share my knowledge with others is my motivation. My body's desire and need for constant challenge, confrontation and the search for intelligent thinking to nourish every layer of my emotional and physical body."

For this physical workshop at laGeste, she starts from senses and sensibility, where she herself gets her mustard as a dancer. She likes to explore the senses with a mixability group and navigate through all of them with everyone, no matter how different everyone is. Of necessity, this will also mean that some senses will be more or less accessible. Yet for Tijen, this is not an obstacle, just a surplus. If you can't see, how do you deal with that non-seeing? What does it provide in terms of extra or different information? Next, she wants to connect different sensory imput and explore what this complex combination projects as an image? Is it an emotion? A story? An image? What does it tell? And about whom?

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Choreographer for series 3 is Lisi Estaras. Lisi has previously worked on several projects with les ballets C de la B. She continues with the mixability group in her exploration of the physical translation of bouncy thoughts and emotions.

This series proposes the theme of pleasure as a starting point to explore our need to find satisfaction and challenge through movements, situations, fantasy and expression. We will focus on the possibilities of the body and uniqueness in relation to others.
Her work explores the way different bodies, ages, backgrounds and personalities can find a common source of energy and freedom to interact and create a universe.
In this way, they discover the unlimited possibilities of playing. There is a focus on translating our thoughts and emotions into dance, working on body structures, words and everyone's story. We seek the pleasure of dance.

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Inclusive workshop series 4 is led by Arno Ferrera & Gilles Pollet, of Compagnie Un loup pour l'homme. As acrobat-performers, they are currently on stage together in the performance Cuir.
In their work, they conduct research on 'masculinity and male characteristics'.

In this workshop, they want to share their approach to working in duo, which is based on the notions of care, support, listening, challenge, endurance and intimacy, among others. They will work on a man-to-man relationship, lifting each other off the ground, supporting, leading and following.

First, they create a safe space together and explore the nurturing power of a caring group. That is the foundation, upon which they will then develop a common vocabulary, starting with listening to a simple touch. Once the basics of caring are an embodied reflex, they move on by lifting each other up. Exploring how to lift and be lifted, support and fly.

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Inclusive workshop series 5 is led by Saïd Gharbi. For more than a decade, Saïd has been involved in dance and theatre projects in Belgium, working as an actor and/or dancer for various productions. Saïd is currently engaged in sensitization workshops on visual limitations for different associations.

This workshop focuses on exploring the state of blindness by moving in space while adopting structures that allow us to feel safe. While moving, we observe what we feel and listen to the space around us.
Jump into the dark with me.

We find confidence to dive into our feelings and become attentive, gentle, playful and fearless. By being creative, sharing with others and being open to the present moment.

Saïd:
"As a blind person, I often take more risks in spaces I don't know. 
As a dancer, I have to have complete trust in my partner and my partner in me.
I let you experience spaces and relationships without seeing'.


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In series 6, choreographer Anouk Llaurens will work with about 20 interested people.

"Through sensorial warm-ups and collective real-time composition games, this series based on Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores, invites us to tune to what I call "the poetic space", i.e. to what is vibrating in and around us. As we listen to the richness and subtlety of our lived experience, we are able to encounter and compose with other ways of seeing and dancing. These practices act on the intimate, artistic and political levels, as eco-somatic explorations that re-inscribe us in an ever changing network of relationships."

The warm-ups activate the attention, the body, the perception and the imagination. Through movement, stillness, touch and listening to our sensations, we explore different body systems such as breathing, muscles, skin or organs and taste the multiple rhythms and dance qualities that are linked to them. Often explorations are also done with the eyes closed to give voice to other senses such as touch, hearing or smell which are more global than sight and often neglected by modern culture. 
During the workshops we alternate between the position of “mover” and “observers”.
This changes of perspective allows us to give and receive direct feedback on our actions, our movement proposals. We also use vocal calls from choreographic practices and video editing to act directly on the emerging composition: “Begin”, “Enter”, “Exit”, “Pause”, Repeat”, “Sustain”, “Reverse”, “Replace”, “Redirect”, “End”. In this way we communicate our esthetic opinion and collectively tune the situation to compose a dance.