SNDO Open School
In celebration of 50 years of SNDO we are excited to open the doors to our regular program. Everyone who would like to experience studying at SNDO today can sign up for our May and June workshops. Please find all information about the workshops and teachers below.
Each workshop is 4 days long, from Monday to Thursday, 10:00 – 16:30 hrs. The workshops take place at the Academy of Theatre and Dance and other studio spaces in Amsterdam. The workshop locations will be shared after purchasing a ticket.
There are limited spots available for each workshop. Courses are open to different levels of experience in choreography and performance. Specific requirements for each course can be found in the schedule below.
Pricing per 4-day workshop:
- Regular price: Є200,-
- SNDO alumni: Є100,-
- Students / CJP / Stadspas / Cultuurpas: Є50,-
- Refugees & undocumented migrants: free
In case you have any questions, including questions about accessibility of the workshops and the workshop locations, please reach out to: SNDO50@ahk.nl.
Workshops
Linking
12-15 May
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
During this 4 day workshop Jija proposes to spend time as a group, going through various experiences that deal with listening to the collective shifts and needs, respecting and contemplating the environment from which to draw inspiration and establish artistic exchange, making in situ spontaneous performances, finding calmness and rest as productive modes and other propositions primarily based on practicing receiving & giving as creative forces.
This workshop is inspired by the long collaboration with Andrea Zavala Folache. It started in SNDO many years ago, by coincidence we were paired up in a class and were given an assignment. From there, we started to meet in the studio without a word, and like that, we developed a performance and a practice called LINKING. that deals with a generative physical and wording movement. More recently, we have collaborated in the research and creation of Lands of Concert, a living practice and a performance that invites radical intimacy. as a mode of spending time together and dare to playfully distort hierarchies and power dynamics through friendship, work and love.
Queer Practices of Feedback, Embodied Consent, and Refusal
Facilitators: alex blum and Szymon Adamczak
12-15 May
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
Feedback is essential in artistic education. It is a form of communication that facilitates mutual learning, frames critique, and generates valuable insights. At best, feedback is a gift that opens space and creates depth. Simultaneously, feedback is a power situation. In this hands-on workshop, Szymon Adamczak and alex blum will offer practices of feedback and queer togetherness inspired by the model of communal queer feedback developed by In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP).
IPOP’s vision of pedagogy is based on an anti-identitarian approach to queerness (you don’t need to identify as queer to participate!), which in itself is perceived as an abundant landscape of responses, politics, identities, and definitions. In our work, we are concerned with a non-normative approach to both art making and the ideologies behind feedback. By understanding pedagogy as accompaniment, we will guide y’all through mapping practices to uncover your own feedback needs and ways of (re)presenting and (un)curating your practice to invite others in.
Our idea is that everyone will learn how to design feed-in and feed-back strategies to support their future work. We will tap into IPOP’s performative and communal practices, including body voting, nervous system regulation, and queer performance methodologies, like maximalism, glitching, and abstraction.
We will always listen to the feedback of the body when determining our politics. We will talk about strategies of how to more-than-survive in art institutions and practice embodied consent and refusal. When practicing art in and around institutions, we are forced to grapple with our complicity with the state and its violence. What does it mean to sense this complicity with feeling? How do we consent to complicity and then refuse compliance? What are the roles of opacity, secrets, gossip, embodied consent, and refusal in queer artistic practices?
The workshop is an invitation. Bring clothes for moving, notebooks, water, and an object that grounds you in your practice.
workshop requirements
Experience with dance is not required, but it is preferred that you have your own creative practice (in any discipline) and are interested in sharing it with others. You are more than welcome to bring a practice, or a sample of what you are working on, but it is not obligatory.
Movement research method: "The Dots"
19-22 May
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
Aleksandra has developed "The Dots," a unique movement research method that she has shared across Belgium, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, Latvia, Croatia, and Germany. This practice is designed to disrupt habitual patterns in improvisation and offer fresh ways of experiencing the body.
It is a method that aims to work as a tool to both acknowledge and avoid the usual organization, rhythm, habits and sequence in our improvisation, and thus resets the body in an unexpected way. The body will be used as a space and “the dot“ as “the author” inside that empty space. We will be working on exploring simple ideas of changing the focus from our body parts as the once that start the movement, to practicing a very precise “point” placed anywhere within our body which initiates the movement. Many exercises are used in a way to give/gain trust to making any kind of choice as the exact right time/moment. Not judging anything as a wrong choice, but rather observing the decisions that have been made by now and composing and deciding further in relation to what has just happened.We will observe past decisions and respond by composing and shaping the next actions in real time. This process heightens awareness of the rapid feedback loop between the body's decisions and its physical responses—an ongoing dialogue that informs further impulses and movement exploration.
Throughout the day, we will engage in two key moments: Solo and performance of the Day
This moment is dedicated to individual exploration, applying The Dots method in a personal movement practice. Through peer exchange, participants will influence and be influenced by each other’s movement, refining their awareness in real time. The focus will be on:
- Initiating movement from precise internal dots rather than habitual body parts.
- Observing the immediate feedback loop between movement decisions and bodily response.
- Composing and reshaping movement based on what has just happened.
workshop requirements
For this workshop, some experience with dance and improvisation is recommended.
Disobedient Bodie(s) and Aesthetic Fugitivisms
19-22 May
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
Disobedient Bodie(s) and Aesthetic Fugitivisms is a laboratory exploring the borders between Art, Social Justice and Somatics. We will explore and play through the lenses of somatic abolitionism, speculative fiction, queer feminist Latin American public performances and pleasure activism. We will experience different relationships to time and space as a way to imagine alternative ways of relating with the world, being in the world and reproducing the world. Based on non-western concepts like trans-corporeality (note 1) and traveling worlds (note 2) we will practice decentering our human gaze, give agency to more-than-human bodies and practice our capacity for merging or existing in two or more realities at the same time.
The sessions will be playgrounds where our capacity for radical imagination and speculative fiction is expanded, transforming mundane or daily practices into absurd, sacred, protest or mythical landscapes, where objects/elements can acquire human or extraordinary faculties and give us renewed narratives of how we perceive and exist in the world. An invitation to re-storying and re-worlding while decentering the human extractivist and individualist oriented gaze.
How can artistic practice regain sovereignty, exceed and problematize institutional logics, how can we problematize ourselves, acknowledge our implicit complicity, how do we force hegemonic powers (university, governments, nuclear family, institutions) to consider us a problem, a danger? (Harney and Moten 2013, 30)
This Laboratory will be practical-theoretical. We will do movement research sessions everyday, share readings of texts, watch videos, listen to podcasts, we will engage with diverse choreographic and performative practices and there will be an embodied outdoor session.
workshop requirements
No prior dance or performance experience is needed.
Notes:
1“Transcorporeality pertains to fluidity between material and theoretical bodies, challenging dualities and dichotomies. Transcorporeality assumes inter- and intra-connections, intra-actions, entanglements and transits between human and other-than-human bodies.” A Radical More-Than-Human Intersectionality in Ecologically Compromised Times: Toward an Attunement to Nonhumans and Indigenous Knowledges by Sanita Fejzic. Chapter 28
2“This vision of traveling involves epistemic shifts to other worlds of sense rather than tourism and colonialism, which lead to consumption, exoticization, and oppression.” In-Between. Latina Feminist phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self by Mariana Ortega. Pag 90.
tracing the other’s dance
2-5 June
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
As the title suggests this movement research workshop deals with the questions of "how to dance beyond the self?" or "how to attune our dancing bodies to the dance of an imagined other?" We will research these questions through the dance practice of "tracing the other''. Through this practice we will be exploring the relationship between “the self" and "an imaginary other”, playing with how this continuously changing relationship finds its expression through the dance that comes about. By “tracing the other’s dance” we’re cheekily engaged with opening our awareness beyond the self confined by identity. Also, “tracing the other’s dance” is a trickster dance that excites a “becoming with” (in the words of Donna Harraway) the dance of the imagined other. This practice is inspired by the following literature, which emphasises the curious mutability of our spirited bodies: "How Forests Think" by Eduardo Kohn, "Ideas on How to Postpone the End of the World" by Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and "The Falling Sky: Word of a Yanomami Shaman" by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Bruce Albert.
workshop requirements
For this workshop it’s required to have some background in embodied imaginative exercises and a deep curiosity to dance and movement as a medium for playing with the edges.
Cultural Appropriation in Dance - Exploration & Reflection
2-5 June
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
This workshop, co-led by Amelia Uzategui Bonilla and Litchi Ly Friedrich, explores the complex and often controversial topic of cultural appropriation in dance. Together, we will unpack key definitions of appropriation, its historical roots, and its impact on dance and other artistic fields. Through case studies from lived experiences, research and dance artistic practices, we will explore cultural ownership, authenticity, and representation in contemporary performance.
Combining practical movement explorations with theoretical discussions, Amelia and Litchi create an engaging environment where participants reflect on how artists navigate cultural material with care and sensitivity. This workshop offers an opportunity for participants to understand how appropriation is relevant to their own artistic practice while fostering critical dialogue.
Using references from relevant literature, digital media and pop-culture, participants will move, discuss, and collaborate in small groups. There will be opportunities for improvisation, peer feedback, and creative proposals that allow for a playful yet reflective engagement with cultural heritage and identity in dance.
This workshop invites everyone to bring their own experiences and ideas into the conversation. Be ready to write, move, and engage in an exchange of perspectives!
Please bring comfortable clothing for movement and materials for note-taking.
workshop requirements
While this workshop is designed for participants with an active artistic practice, anyone interested in its topics and eager to explore them through the lens of dance is warmly welcome to join.
Lighting Design for Contemporary Dance and Performance
16-19 June
10:00 – 16:30 hrs
In this workshop we explore how we can create meaning with Lighting Design, whether it functions as a supportive layer in your performances (in a performance) or as a more horizontal, autonomous element.
Participants acquire insight in the lighting design process as a whole:
- what steps and choices can you take in the development from idea towards a finished design.
- how can you translate your ideas into the 5 building blocks of lighting design.
- how can you talk about lighting design and communicate your ideas.
The workshop gives you an opportunity to research your personal affinity in lighting design and develop a vision of what role you like light to play in your performative works. This will be done through several activities in and out of class. Information is given in the form of presentations that show examples of how lighting design is used in the performative works of contemporary dance and performance makers. Individual research can be conducted through a reader, the AHK library or activities of your own choice. These theoretical activities are exchanged with personal affinity and creative assignments in which this information is directly applied.
workshop requirements
This workshop is designed for students and makers who want to increase their knowledge of and insight into lighting design in relation to their practice.
How To Chill 101
workshop with Parisa
23-26 June
10:00-16:30 hrs
"The earlier we start with deprogramming from White Supremacy and Capitalism with methods of rest and community care, the better!"
With a mix of theory and practice, we will, for example, learn simple massage techniques and experiment with ‘doing nothing’ together.
This workshop is dedicated to lifelong unraveling, a love practice and healing journey that relates to resting and resisting.
This workshop will be in English and in silence.
We will read and discuss academic texts (about white supremacy, burn-out culture, colonialism, intersectionality) for one day.
If you miss Monday, you cannot attend Tuesday, but you can join Wednesday and Thursday. Monday prepares you for the week, so it is recommended to join from the beginning.
No particular expertise or knowledge is needed to attend this workshop, and you can leave whenever you want.
Emotional topics such as fears, overwhelmedness, and self-esteem are welcome to be shared here. Please bring comfortable indoor clothing, weatherproof outside clothes and shoes, pillows and cozy blankets, tarot cards, family photos, dream journals, notebooks, pens, and anything else that gives you a sense of safety and well-being.