3 - 7 Jul 2017

Technique and expression

Salva Sanchis > Técnica y expresión

In dance, as in any other practice, learning to use technique is not the same as learning to be technical.

The capacity to dance does not necessarily include the capacity to explain, technically, how movement works. Becoming aware of the mechanisms of movement can help efficiency in movement, but it can also interfere with intuition and fluidity. Adding conscious awareness does not always equal adding efficiency. In fact, I would say that in all cases, turning the implicit into explicit disturbs the fluidity of movement, at least provisionally. Once new information is acquired, it can be integrated into movement, becoming implicit again. This is what integrating information is all about.

As to becoming technical, as a dancer one should be interested in the opposite path: to derive explicit knowledge out of implicit experience. Being technical, in contrast to using technique, allows us to acquire flexibility, to find solutions in situations where learned technical tools do not reach or fit.

In this workshop we will try to disentangle these paradoxes through the practice of movement. This will not be a theoretical workshop; any discussion or reflection will have to be supported by practice. Improvisation and set material will alternate without hierarchy. They are two sides of the same coin, and we will have to experiment with both to discover that, finally, the difference between them is small.

What we look for eventually is to try to learn and practice an approach to movement technique that does not work against intuition, but rather the opposite: technique should be the means to expression.

SALVA SANCHÍS is a dancer, choreographer and pedagogue who lives near Barcelona. In 1998 he graduated with the first generation of P.A.R.T.S. and has been teaching and producing dance pieces since then. He has collaborated with choreographers Marc Vanrunxt and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker on several occasions. His last two creations have been shown recently in Barcelona at el Mercat de les Flors: "Radical Light" (2016) and "A Love Supreme" (2005/2017), this last one in collaboration with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. From 2017, Salva has stopped indefinitely his choreographic activity to focus on study and teaching.

More about Salva Sanchis at La Caldera