Valeska Gert Visiting Professors since 2006

Repose to Power: Claiming the Immersive Practice of "ease"

The course will focus on the phenomenon of “ease” and is based on somatic practices that facilitate a profound experience of ease, repose pleasure and spaciousness. In the daily documentation of these practices, the students will be required to reflect not only on the processes of the practice, but also on its aftermath to facilitate a revision of perspective. The final showcase will include a devised text from the documentation alongside movement and voice phrases that would emerge in response to the suggestive practice. 

Navtej Johar's work is based on the principles of the classical Indian dance style Bharatanatyam, Physical Theater and somatic approaches. An awardee of the Sangeet Batak Academy for Contemporary Choreography, Johar links dance movement with critical theory work and social action. In his practice as a yoga teacher, he works with asana, pranayama, meditation, visualization, and Vedic chanting. In addition to his artistic practice, Johar also stands out for his political advocacy for LGBTQI* rights. The Indian law decriminalizing homosexuality, which passed the Supreme Court in the summer of 2018, bears his name.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD)

Performance and Agency in Decoloniality: Queering the Archive

Decoloniality or decolonialism is a school of thought which focuses on untangling the production of knowledge from a primarily Eurocentric episteme. It critiques the perceived universality and superiority of Global North knowledges and cultures.

This seminar designed for dance studies masters will concentrate on performance as agency, through strategies of queering, border thinking, and archives. Participants will focus on overcoming the present in dance and performance, with its intersectional contestations surrounding race, migration, class, sexuality, and gender. It focuses on the practice of creating unhappy archives. Final presentation will include the unpacking and sharing of each individual unhappy archive with the public, its conception, its embodiment, and its potentiality in worlds-creating.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).

Bodies in Motion:
Orientation and alignment of a relational body

In his Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship in the 2022 summer semester, Austrian choreographer, dancer, performer and visual artist Philipp Gehmacher analyses the practice of bodies in movement and their understanding of space, place, landscape and object. The aim is to explore the relational body, to share it, to open it and to make it experienceable in a performance.

In the presentation, students of dance studies at Freie Universität Berlin show the results of their seminar work with the Austrian choreographer and visiting professor Philipp Gehmacher. Using objects, images and text materials, they question their bodies in different constellations in order to explore and render the relational body tangible through performative acts and improvisation.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD)

In-Between Spaces – Seismographic Bodies

During her third Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship, Swiss dancer and choreographer Anna Huber explores with a focus on in-between spaces and border zones, how the choreographies of everyday life and the scores and traces of paths in public space have shifted in the current pandemic, this crisis of the corporeal. Using somatic methods (such as body-mind centring), she sensitises body consciousness and sensual perception. In dialogue with the architectures of the space, the body is experienced as an instrument of a creative process and confidence in body knowledge and environment is strengthened.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Disruptive Constellations – Practices of Reinterpretation

French dancer and choreographer Anne Collod was co-founder of the group Quatuor Albrecht Knust, which was dedicated to re-enactments of early modern dance in the 1990s. Significantly influenced by her later collaboration with Anna Halprin (1920 – 2021), her work today focuses on questions of utopias of the collective and of being together in different dance contexts. Together with the students, she will examine processes of choreographic recreation and explore new methods of practice in relation to Halprin’s work.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin und dem German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

How Imagination Works

For Toshiki Okada, director, author, founder and director of the chelfitch Company, Tokyo, imagination is at the heart of making theatre: “I see imagination on stage as a kind of choreographer; it is very often a genius at finding crazy movements you cannot create through theoretical thinking.” He will initially work with the students on observing how they can be affected by imagination and how it moves their bodies, and then develop this further using language and by making movements more interesting.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Adaptations – Retrospective Video Lecture

Michael Laub is a Belgian choreographer, performance artist and director. In Laub's multi-layered performances, adaptations from various media and epochs serve as a catalyst for autonomous strands that are transferred into carefully orchestrated staged pieces. By collaborating with highly-skilled artists as well as non-professionals, Laub is specifically known for crossfading his performer's reality with fiction. He has gained recognition for his adaptations of portraiture to the stage, which he acquires by making use of realism as well as consequently superimposing the spontaneous with the artificial.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Dance Archive Box Berlin

Nanako Nakajima is a dance scholar and dance dramaturge, and a certified traditional Japanese dance master, Kannae Fujima. Her research focuses on aging bodies in dance, archiving movement, and dance dramaturgy. Nanako Nakajima will develop her own Berlin version of the project Dance Archive Box. Among others, the project posed the question, how it is possible to separate a dance from the communal histories of the dance maker and to produce a Dance Archive Box as a creative common ground for all people.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Crafting Poetic Ambiance

Navtej Johar is a dancer-choreographer, scholar, yoga exponent, and a social activist. His work draws on plural vocabularies such as bharatanatyam, physical theatre, and somatics. The course will provide a working understanding of the Indian theory of bhava-rasa aesthetics and will focus on how a poetic ambiance may first be mentally constructed, calibrated and carefully designed, and then physically inhabited, experienced and expressed: If bhava is like a flower then rasa is its fragrance.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Simple Action – Shared Practices

The most recent works by Israeli dancer and choreographer Yasmeen Godder evolved from the desire to open up shifting perspectives in her performances and to invite people to come closer to the physical and emotional experience while still maintaining the traditional theatre experience. During the seminar, she will create a ritual / meeting / performance with the students, inviting spectators to join without prior knowledge, and to research different methods of creating an "open door" choreography.

In cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin and the DAAD.

Performing Trauma

Writer, theatre director and choreographer Nora Amin is a founding member of the Modern Dance Theatre Company at The Cairo Opera House, director of Lamusica Independent Theatre Group and has published on theatre and human rights. Her seminar in the context of the visiting professorship will deal with dance as a medium of political resistance, transformation and healing. Together with the students, Amin will study the physicality connected to traumatic experiences and explore performative practices of representation.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and DAAD.

With her City Theatre and Dance Group, Robyn Orlin has been provoking the exploration of social issues in her home country for a number of years. She studied Dance at the Contemporary Dance School in London and has been focusing on topics such as apartheid and postcolonialism as a choreographer in South Africa since 1993. She celebrated her breakthrough in 1998 with the piece Daddy, I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other, for which she was presented with the Lawrence Olivier Award, the most important British theatre award. She received a multitude of other prizes and awards, including the French National Order of Merit, the Ordre national du Mérite.
Her subsequent productions, for example We must eat our suckers with the wrappers on (2002), Walking next to our shoes (2009) and most recently Beauty stayed just for a moment and then returned to her start position (2013), were also substantially inspired by Orlin's home country of South Africa. Orlin has led a multitude of national and international choreography workshops (in countries such as Japan, Greece and Germany) and is the founder of the Dance Department of the Federated Union of Black Artists.
With the students of Dance Studies, she will provide insights into her artistic exploration of different cultural concepts. She will use experiences from the students' direct surroundings as impulses and stimuli for the development of their own forms of presentation, which will question the transfer of the students' own and other cultures in their boundaries.