Offered by queer practitioners in the field of performing arts. Sign-up is required for these workshops. Please find the relevant links below. There is limited capacity for each workshop.
Past Workshops
In this two-hour workshop In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP) led teachers and other artists through a series of practices developed over our first year of research into queering artistic feedback. We started with an overview of methodologies for applying various queer principles to reflecting and supporting performance. We explored how educators can view art through different queer lenses and asked how work relates to or utilizes ideas such as normativity, camp, and reinterpretations of history or culture. From there we explored some key findings from our research on how to design and run feedback sessions intended to support queer artists. Finally, we took time to try out some specific methodologies we used during our 2022 Feedback Sessions.
For our first PRACTICAL WORKSHOP IPOP was delighted to welcome the esteemed drag queen, scholar and dragtivst Taka Taka to present a one-hour lecture followed by a practical workshop exploring character creation with tools that they have developed from their camp – dragtivist practice, resulting in short performances for and with our characters. The aim of this workshop was to reveal the act of dressing/undressing as an undeniable personal and social engagement by having fun while understanding one’s impact, the realities of character and their production from fingernail to toenail. For this workshop we used tools from drag to define our performance characters and reflect on the following question: How can we relate to society in order to channel and experience the power and responsibility of getting attention through our altered public image? November 2021. For more information see the Facebook event.
IPOP is excited to commission Amsterdam-based artist and performance maker Ira Brand to offer a practical workshop exploring notions of control and lack of control in live performance. How can we create practices and frameworks that allow us to not be fully in control, within the situation of a live work? Why might we want to? Ira Brand has for a long time been fascinated with ideas of control and power, both in her life and in her performance practice. Her work is often pursuing ways to destabilise her own sense of control, and to trouble binary expectations of where the power lies. She has an interest in putting herself in particular embodied states, in finding a ‘looseness’ as a performer, and in letting go of the reins as a maker.
December 2021. For more info see the Facebook event.
in this workshop we will be delving into the use of voice in performance through the practice of moaning. wailing/whale-ing, whimpering, whining, weeping, sighing, groaning, shrieking, yowling, howling etc. are some of the sonic data that are part of the large spectrum of moaning. because animals* across various species express themselves through moaning, it is like a spinster connecting our voices across cultures and across species. this practice to me is inherently queer, as in wayward and perverse, since it provokes sounds that are by the dominant culture hushed and shamed into the private space or even into non-existence all together. thus, it is is as a queer spinster that i’m advancing this practice.
for this brief study period together i want to focus on the importance of the voice as a powerful tool (and thus the importance of the liberation of our voices) in performance. in my own works, having danced and having been danced by the voice has helped me to connect more deeply with the immense affective potential of our bodies on stage. i want to share this practice, hoping that it puts into motion and brings into light the deeply hidden whining and whaling monsters and deviants within you all.
* i include human in animal as i want to emphasize our proximity to our physical nature.
March 2022. For more information see the Facebook event.
Using the literary techniques of biomythography (coined by Audre Lorde) and critical fabulation (coined by Saidiya Hartman) this workshop seeks to translate these literary techniques into techniques for developing performative strategies. How can these systems of enmeshing biography, historical archive, mythology and fabulation act as a mechanism to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done" (Hartman, 2008). What can this destabilization produce in the way of a "slippage" of assumptions and rigid meaning making and identity making processes. April 2022. For more information see the Facebook event.
In this workshop you are invited to develop a personal and communal understanding of ancestry rooted in spiritual practices of meditation, writing, body movement, dance, multi-sensorial stimulation, altar making, and group talks.
The aim is to create a decolonial safer space where we can develop an understanding of what communal healing could look like in a society that is continuously coming into existence through colonialism. The history and reality of different people who were forced to migrate still exist in systems today, in which people are being marginalized, oppressed and excluded.
May 2022. For more information see the Facebook event.
