Workshops

Djalma Primordial Science regularly leads workshops for actors, dancers, visual artists and all those interested in exploring movement and sound from unconditioned spaces internal to the body. A typical workshop consists of six hours daily training of body, voice, sensory perception, and observation, lasting from two days to two weeks. Djalma workshops have been hosted internationally by organizations such as Mime Centrum Berlin, Antagon theaterAKTion , Theater Training Initiative of London, and Exploratorium Berlin. For the CURRENT SCHEDULE OF WORKSHOPS see events

Le Corps: SENS DEDANS DEHORS
workshop for dance-theater in the landscape.
Led by DJALMA PRIMORDIAL SCIENCE
At NOGANETS, Puygaillard de Quercy, FRANCE.
August 1-10, 2008. For complete details see events.

integrating with/ disintegrating into: THE LAND IV.
dance-theater workshop led by Djalma Primordial Science
in the desert of Mountainair, New Mexico. July 16--23, 2006.

From 2002-2006, Djalma Primordial Science taught each summer "integrating with/disintegrating into: THE LAND", a dance-theater workshop in the desert wilderness of New Mexico. For seven days, from dawn to dusk, we led physical training with focus on elemental participation in high desert landscape. Please find below a description of the workshop and testimonies from the participants from summers past.

The dance is a mirror which thaws fear. Tatsumi Hijikata

Our training attempts to crack the shell of socially ingrained movements to arrive at a dance of existing rather than expressing. The desert permits one to make instantaneous sacrifices that link one back to the oldest sciences of the earth: one sweats, one's skin begins to burn, one becomes a victim to the sun’s consumption. One can begin to stand like a regal cactus in its inviolable fortress of quills. There are certain states of the body that appear to us as immediately sacred, such as infancy, pregnancy, death, and lunacy. The work of Djalma Primordial Science seeks to bridge the contemporary body with the displaced sacred bodies under elemental conditions of nature, connecting our evolutionary future with our evolutionary past.

Now approaching its fifth summer, this workshop explores through the body the transformative habits of matter, sound and the UR-matter of space, a physical and emotional connectivity to PLACE. The landscape itself shall be the primary teacher. Our inspiration emerges from direct contact with the elements, long journeys in blindness, sensory immersion and confusion, mapping and getting lost, observing the dance of the microcosm.

We will cultivate the skill of being a witness: of the environment and of each other. Seeing will become feeling in order to have this sensitivity reappear inside our own dance. We begin to sense the drama dormant in the landscape and to allow a shifting terrain to transform our posture, our thoughts. We research seeing with the ear: how sound is invisible movement. We lengthen the nerves beyond the clothing of the skin and the environment starts to dance inside our empty body. As our identity crumbles off the body, we begin to merge with the land. What exists before language? What exists before (and after) the lines and geographies of the human? As the estranged human form experiences its awkwardness in the body of the landscape is there a cry of separation?

Each day consists of eight to ten hours of movement exploration. In preparation for the research, we begin with a rigorous warm-up, unleashing the body's energy reserves. Special attention is given to opening the channels of the voice and the breath in connection with the movement, to giving and receiving energy from others. Often we will work in partners and within the energy of the larger group, however, the focus of the workshop is to develop the skills of solo improvisation. Partner bodywork will be incorporated to facilitate the body’s rejuvenation. We will take field trips to the ancient Gran Quivira pueblo ruins and nearby salt fields for movement research inside these special locations. Accommodations at THE LAND/ an art site are primitive, no running water or electricity. We will cook vegetarian food communally, sleep in tents, and use solar showers. Registration is through an application process only; early registration is encouraged, as the workshop size is limited to twelve participants. To apply please contact djalmaprisci@hotmail.com

Statements from workshop participants: integrating with/ disintegrating into: THE LAND

"Things knotted up inside me unraveled: it had to do with the small becoming large and the large becoming small; the close distant, the distant intimate. Attachment and its relationship to violence. Disintegration and its relationship to Love. Ephia and Jeff, thank you for your depth, imagination, presence, and especially for your originality. Everyday I got to enter another world and to explore how much of the other worlds I could bring back with me, how much of myself I could leave there. Each exercise was a multi-dimensional poem: perfect little poems expanding and contracting in all directions, out to the bear star and as deep as my spleen. I loved to listen to the instructions, the phrasing, the images, the pace. Language itself became a rabbit hole." Melanie Noel, poet.

"I can feel the effects of it in my bones and in my heart and, well, in my courage. The fact that the workshop and the dance itself are so physically AND emotionally demanding helped me to put my mind into my body, and manifest both right here, on the surface of the earth. I think the work you're doing, both of you, is very important, that I am honored to have participated in it." Benjamin Walsh, filmmaker

"This has been the closest I have felt to nature ever--nature, my own nature. Smashing my face in the soil, walking through prickly trees, searing the earth with the soles of my feet. Feeling my body’s presence I can begin to understand that I am from the Earth. In this way death can be thought of as a journey home." Shada McKenzie, visual artist.

"I deeply appreciate the uncompromising, the continual push of the limits of my physicality and the limits of my perception. I have broken and healed many times throughout the workshop; I leave transformed." Rosie Brandenburger, musician/environmentalist.

“I have not forgotten what it was like rolling into some worm like existence, morphing into wiry and crooked trees whose elderly lifeless limbs lay strewn about pushing accusatory suggestions into the body i once knew, the inspiration of which released me into the exquisite beauty and pain of a tree and its' being, and i must wonder, perhaps as i catch glimpses of nearly forgotten dreams, like rain. a flash or a flicker of some sun beaten synaptic landscape that sits up as quick as mountain’s form and begs to know if the tree became me ? or i became the tree? ” Ken Cornell, experimental musician