Program FINDING WAYS by Sandra JOHNSTON and Alastair MACLENNAN. 2017
August 29 – September 3, 10:00-14:00, a lecture hall of the Lviv Museum of Religious History (Muzeina Square, 1).
Program FINDING WAYS by Sandra JOHNSTON and Alastair MACLENNAN in frame of the School of Performance 2017
We ask each participant to bring to the workshop, one object, pertinent to their art practice and that they could imagine using in a performance. Secondly, we would ask that each person bring an object or material that they find difficult or uninspiring. Attention will be given on how to maximize benefits in the handling of material, and on decisions made re component parts of a performance, on how actions can (best) transition into each other, on how to evolve comprehensive benefits from one idea or image, and on developing further variations and developmental changes, on an ongoing basis.
MAIN CONCEPT
The workshop intends to support participants in developing the discipline to enable focused attention, maximizing the participant’s sense of inter-linked, mind/body movement and capacity to engage in the transformative behavior.
Core values are to help participants develop skills in mental and physical connections…and to grasp essential aspects of their performance practice, building confidence and decisiveness in considering what elements and/or ideas have significant potential and vitality for further exploration…and realizing the importance of using personal insight and intuition to uncover essential elements of one’s own practice, without reliance on over-interpretive physical and/or verbal conceptualising.
STRUCTURE
Each day the workshop will build progressively on the events of the previous days. Sessions will generally be structured around periods of collective activity, directed towards building concentration, cooperation, communication and developing trust within the group, enabling participants to find ways of using mind/body energies, particularly ways of focusing awareness on the body as a performance ‘instrument’ helping each participant to function, individually and collectively, as an organic whole.
These activities will be interspersed by participants making individual, improvised actions, of varying length and receiving concise and honest feedback from MacLennan, Johnston and the group, all working as a teaching/learning unit. Participants will be encouraged how to discern, learn to edit, and build on significant aspects, moments and core qualities in their solo actions.
Attention will be given on how to communicate constructive perceptions about the work of others, for their (and the communicator’s) benefit. Developing good feedback skills is important if participants decide to build support systems for sustaining performance practice beyond the end of the workshop experience.
Emphasis will be given to opening up awareness of present ‘moment,’ mind/body interconnections, showing how ideas/actions can evolve, any-and-everywhere, using the body as a ‘landscape’ of untapped potential, making ‘unexpected’ relationships, using any… and/or all… of the senses, as appropriate. Guidance will be given on how to move internally and externally simultaneously and how to fuse opposites, navigate obstacles and work in a fluid collective way.
