Flying Low & Passing Through workshop with David Zambrano in Barcelona 2021
Where: Institute of the Arts Barcelona Carrer Ramón de Dalmases Marqués de Mura, 18 08870 Sitges – Barcelona
When: May 24th until Jun 04th, 2021
David Zambrano
David Zambrano has been making dance for over 30 years. In his pursuits as both a creator and educator, Zambrano has visited 63 countries, worked with thousands of dancers, and has performed at hundreds of venues across the world. His pieces range from set choreography, structured improvisation, and pure improvisation. Born in Venezuela, Zambrano spent 15 years in New York, and now lives between Amsterdam and Brussels continuing to perform and teach worldwide. His improvisation is committed to art as a cultural exchange developing the creative process in a world without borders. Zambrano sees improvisation as an art and choreography as a vehicle to further develop his work in improvisation.
Flying-Low
This workshop focuses mainly on the dancer’s relationship with the floor. The class utilizes simple movement patterns that involve breathing, speed and the release of energy throughout the body in order to activate the relationship between the center and the joints, moving in and out of the ground more efficiently by maintaining a centered state. There is a focus on the skeletal structure that will help improve the dancers physical perception and alertness. The class includes partnering work and movement phrases, which explore the primary laws of physics: cohesion and expansion.
The class begins in stillness and students are asked to read their body in a standing position. They are urged to connect their entire body with the environment: the air, floor, and the energy of others, forming an interconnection by just standing. When you are standing, the whole room is standing. This stillness jumps to running and passing through each other, running forward backward and around creating a dance web. The highways of the room are warming up. When you are moving, the whole room is moving.
The body is constantly spiraling, whether running or standing. These spirals help the dancers into the floor and out of the floor. These spirals already exist; this workshop focuses on finding them. The spirals help the dancer see themselves and the room from all sides. The dancer knows what is behind him/her as he/she goes forward. To activate these spirals, students locate their center and move all of their joints from this center. Arms, legs, hands, toes, elbows, feet become extensions of the center. The spirals propel the class all over the room, both on the ground and upright. This is the flying low technique.
Passing Through
In the making of movement compositions, David Zambrano focuses on creating and developing the dynamics for complex systems to present leadership in the form of a group web. In science, cells do not need a protein leader to create life. Neither does the brain need one protein leader to create a thought. With this in mind, Zambrano feels that movement needs no leader in creation.
The “passing through” takes students through various exercises to manifest that same philosophy. The group will create dynamics that will be flexible, complex, getting the group to fit tight together, yet always keeping doors open for the unpredictable. The group moves constantly, transforming the environment of the dance.
After taking part in the “passing through” the student will learn to instantly connect with their environment and become more spontaneous in the making of choices as an improviser, choreographer or dancing in someone else’s work.
Zambrano uses three main exercises to complete this training. Under, over and around enables the student to make instantaneous creative choices as well as increases flexibility in both the mind and body. It is a very physical game that requires a lot of endurance in which the full body of the student goes under, over and around the bodies of other students. Zambrano allows no time to take to make a plan, therefore the student learns the choosing and doing as one. By the end, dancers will dissolve into other dancers as one with the environment.
With leading and following, the students use their bodies to constantly exchange the roles of leader and follower. They do so unprompted, according to their instantaneous individual needs. The student must focus on either leading or following, how and when to make the choice to change, and how to control their body while doing so. The student can never get lost because they are constantly leading or following. From an outside vantage point, the group should give the appearance that it is moving without a leader or a follower while truthfully, everyone is leading and following.
The workshop culminates when Zambrano asks the students to see the room full of pathways – infinite pathways passing through the walls, the floor, even the bodies. These pathways go in any direction and are filled with curves, large and small.
Visible and invisible spirals are constantly passing through the students. Thus the “passing through” is created into a spontaneous composition. When the group becomes one mind, it can never get lost, there is never one person leading, everyone is following. The whole group is constantly traveling, weaving their bodies inside and out of their classmates and still always aware of the environment around them.
To register and for further information email espiralycurva@gmail.com
the inscription is only valid after the payment of half price of the workshop, via bank transfer. Please send us an email and we will send you the bank information.
Costs for participants: 425€
The inscription is only valid after the payment of half price of the workshop, via bank transfer. Please send us an email and we will send you the bank information.
For further information, please visit https://www.facebook.com/flyinglowbcn