Marie Topp Dansalliansen Workshop

Workshop with Marie Topp, for professional dancers organized by Dansalliansen.

The workshop will be based on a movement practice that I’m currently developing for a new series of works, dealing with the body as an object for the gaze. It sets the premises that if the sight is blurred, other senses are activated and hereby also the production of other kinds of knowledge – both in the performers and in the bodies of the audience.

The practice is based on distinct ways of working with the gaze; how the sensibility of the body is affected by how we see. We will work with choreography of the gaze; a zooming between the haptic and the optic vision. Between direct eye contact and blurred vision. Our eyes will be “organs of touch”. The haptic vision asks of you to take control of the focus and actively be the creator of the experience by touching with your gaze. The sense of touching creates the feeling of closeness. The optic vision allows you to distance your body to the object of the gaze. To separate yourself from it. We will work with this oscillation between near and far and with the movement it produces.

During the workshop, we will be practicing different ways of seeing, allowing this to be the generator of movement. We will experiment with different ways to obtain haptic visuality as performers as well as spectators. We will shift between seeing/moving in structured improvisations and reflect on how and what we perceive as spectators.