Sounds For Dancers is a free, intensive six-day research workshop with artist/musician and performance maker Christopher Willes and collaborators (Toronto/Montréal) which will investigate sonic-somatic practices.

We are seeking five dance and performance-based artists to participate. No prior experience with music/sound-making is necessary. The workshop will conclude with a public exhibition/performance sharing of the research with the public at Betonsalon on December 2nd. Workshop participants will receive a 170 euro fee for contributing to the public event.

Co-facilitated with dance artists Ellen Furey and Brendan Jensen, Sounds For Dancers will invite participants into performance scores and exercises borrowed from a new work the group is currently creating, entitled RADIANCE, which places alternative healing practices in conversation with experimental music performance. Through sound and movement scores, hands-on experimentation, reflection and dialog, the sessions will explore choreography and sound-making as a unified practice that centres on collective care, sensitivity and awareness of others.

The sessions will oscillate between two modalities: 1) sound choreographies, which are scores for group improvisations that invite moving and performing with musical instruments in unusual ways; and 2) sound massages, in which individual listeners are led into direct physical and tactile experiences of sound through a carefully guided process. These explorations will be repeated each day with participants––examined and refined together—and eventually shared in the concluding public event in a live exhibition/performance of the practices.

Hosted as part of “Un·Tuning Together”, Sounds for Dancers reflects on the shared lineage of thinking and practice between North American avant-garde traditions of contemporary dance and experimental music. And the project’s title is borrowed from a note found in the Pauline Oliveros archives which appears to be the beginnings of a syllabus for a class entitled “Sound for Dancers 1”.

What to expect:

This workshop will involve sound making (no experience required), movement, some consensual touch (mediated by objects), discussion, reading, drawing and writing.

The workshop will be facilitated in english, but we will do our best to encourage collective translation and will gladly slow down when needed. Processes of facilitation and learning are not distinct from issues of social justice, democracy, and community cohesion. Active listening, care, consent, and responsibility to the group are values that as a facilitator we will work hard to continuously center throughout our time together.

The approach to facilitation will be informed by the groups combined backgrounds in experimental music, dance and interdisciplinary performance, along with studies in Conflict Coaching (Willes and Furey, University of Waterloo) and Alexander Technique (Jensen).

Performance Fee: 170 €