Intimacy for the Apocalypse asks: What are the new constellations, networks, and strategies for experiencing, sharing, and creating intimacy? This workshop experiments with compositional and improvisational methods for rehearsing new ways of being in relation with ourselves and one another. These are methods for engaging with nonlinear time, iterative language, and emergent fractal thought patterns. These strategies allow us to not only disrupt, but transcend Western capitalistic logics of narrativizing, linearity, and individual identity. We will engage with micro movements, energetic tuning scores, and emergent text constructions to collectively develop a shared movement and language vocabulary which will serve as material to construct our performance event. We do not know what will come next, or how we will get there, but we can allow it to radically unfold if we practice deep noticing.
Emily Barasch is an LA based queer interdisciplinary Choreographer, Scholar, Intimacy Director, and Educator. Emily believes that the ways our physical bodies move through the world are reflections of our past encounters and rehearsals for our future encounters. When we perform in dance, theater, and film our past, present, and future selves conjure and converge into one another. In her choreography and performances, Emily is obsessed with the difficulty of performance making. She is excited by the challenge of building a new world with its own set of spatial, temporal, and linguistic logics with every piece. Emily believes the heightened frame and ephemeral container of performance allows us to experiment with alternate ways of being in the world, attempting to access alternate possibilities that are not able to be expressed in dominant notions of time, space, and identity. I am thinking through choreography as constructed ecosystems, wherein the social order is highly prescribed and everybody plays a role. These roles however can be fucked with and slippages and refusals can occur. If the dominant order is constructed, we can choreograph new ones. She holds an MFA in Choreography from UCLA's department of World Arts and Culture/Dance. Her independent choreography has been presented at and received support from Highways Performance Space, Electric Lodge, Eden's Expressway, Triskelion Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Atelier Real and Forum Dança in Lisbon, Portugal, Ponderosa and PReS Residency in Germany, and The Stockholm Fringe Festival. She is a lecturer at UC Riverside's Dance Department and the Intimacy Director at Cal Arts School of Theater.