This year’s March | dance, a festival for contemporary body-centric work, will focus on artists who often rely on practices other than dance as a way to find articulation as creators.
Antonio Carallo, a dancer and actor based in Europe, formerly working as a prominent member for the Pina Bausch dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal, will be conducting a workshop. The workshop will be divided into two parts. The first will be a movement-centric ‘class’. Antonio will lead with a strong focus on body consciousness and movement quality. The second half will be a component that looks at the creativity of the individual participants. Using improvisational/compositional strategies that lead to developing short solos or duets.
Navtej Singh Johar’s pedagogic work on the dialogue between Yoga and newer somatic practices will bring us to the mechanical heart of movement – how it is spoken, how words translate into action. Avantika Bahl’s silent duet employing Indian sign language raises question about vocabularies and stylizations that are not dance, yet more urgent somehow. For Meghna Bharadwaj, completing her doctorate in Performance Studies, writing dance is a powerful tool and prism through which to understand her processes.
Malavika Chakravarty brings together her drawing and body in a taut, precisely timed exploration of image. Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy’s newest work Trance/It, a duet of pure physicality, will
be presented as a work in progress. As well, this year, as a way to throw open our doors to practitioners from outside the dance space, is a weeklong workshop by Antonio Carallo from Berlin/Italy. As integral member of the Pina Bausch company for fifteen years, Antonio will address several issues that surround performativity and theatrical expression in dance in a way that is relevant to this context.
And, gluing all this together, will be talks, films on dance, interviews and hopefully many informal meetings between dance and its audience on the terrace of the Goethe-Institut, Chennai.
Participation to the workshop is for professional dancers, theatre practitioners and performers, based on an application - selection procedure.