WORKSHOPS

Ephia Gburek regularly leads workshops for actors, dancers, visual artists and all those interested in exploring movement from unconditioned spaces internal to the body. Her workshops have been hosted internationally by the Mime Centrum Berlin, Theater Training Initiative of London, Exploratorium Berlin, Nordic School of Butoh, and RAMDAM. Ephia is a guest teacher at Contemporary Physical Performance Making master's program at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater, Tallinn. 

UPCOMING....

SENTIER(S) intérieur(s)
workshop of dance research-- body weather/butoh

8 to 12 August 2024 at
Site de pratiques théâtrales Lavauzelle
23250 Janaillat, France
www.lavauzelle.org

This dance workshop develops the perception, imagination, and presence of the dancing body through physical experiences in nature.

Passing through internal spaces of the body toward the environment which surrounds us, we elaborate a practice of physical listening to go beyond our quotidian, socially-coded body. Our dance practice consists of sensory explorations, playing with the elasticity of Time, and acts of becoming other by pouring our imagination into movement. We seek a point of contact with the earth to awaken and re-situate the body, to amplify our sensations : skin envelope, rhizomes of nerves, marrow of bones... Our anatomy embraces the terrain and a new body-map unfolds. Shifting our posture, titling our thoughts, the landscape lends us its instability and offers a new potential for transformation.

Let us consider dance as a discipline of madness for human evolution, permitting us to climb over the walls that society has constructed around the body.

After her stay in Japan at Min Tanaka's Body Weather Farm, Ephia Gburek developed her approach to physical para-theatrical training by proposing four summer workshops from 2002 to 2006 in the desert wilderness of New Mexico. Her research has continued to evolve over the last fifteen years on European soil. During her workshops Ephia Gburek shares her interrogations into the shiftings of consciousness, presence and listening, non-verbal modes of communication, relations between body and object, body and material, body and landscape. She travels with the group towards a profound awakening of sensory perception and  imagination, towards a choreography through states of presence. 

PROCESS/

I enter a place in order to sense her perspective. I ask this place how to dance within her...

Through tactile listening and multiple ways of seeing and receiving, we open passages between the body and the environment, the quotidian and the dream, the individual and the group. Blinded, we lengthen our nerves beyond the clothing of the skin to expand our perception of the “living space” which surrounds us. 

Changing perspective, changing scale, we follow the invitation to become other. Merging pleasantly into matter, we experience our own body as a foreign landscape. 

I begin to be involved, to be enveloped. Immersed, I lack a point of view. I begin to feel...

Ice nervously cracks, crystals of sugar sigh and dissolve into the tea, water vapor condenses on the face of the stone, smoke wanders lazily across the wool of the pull-over. Human-being rediscovers relation to his material cousins. Untamed existences, moving beyond or falling short of expression :
our daily training will be through acts of metamorphosis.




 

DAILY FLOW/


The workshop, taught in French and (if needed) English, is open to dancers, actors, poets, visual artists and all others who wish to wander through the interior spaces of the body.

The daily practice alternates mornings of physical research inside the studio accompanied by live music and afternoons of research in nature, in nearby prairies and forest.


PRACTICAL INFORMATION/
Contact, informations, réservations:  www.lavauzelle.org

ARCHIVES:   integrating with/ disintegrating into: THE LAND  intensive workshops 

led by  Djalma Primordial Science

"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 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

"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. 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 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