Intimacy for the Apocalypse: Workshop+ Performance Lab

Intimacy for the Apocalypse asks: What are the new constellations, networks, and strategies for experiencing, sharing, and creating intimacy? This 5 week workshop experiments with methods for rehearsing for 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. 

This class will be structured around the first three weeks functioning as a workshop led by Emily where we will read, practice movement scores and prompts, write, and discuss. The final two weeks will serve as a performance laboratory. During the performance lab component, we will work both individually, in pairs, and as an ensemble to structure the material excavated in the first three weeks into a performance event. 

This workshop is open to anyone who has an ongoing artistic practice in dance, choreography, music/sound, theater, performance. No technical dance training required!

Emily Barasch is an LA based queer interdisciplinary artist and scholar, working across mediums of dance, performance, film, and text. 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.  

In the words of Jack Halberstam
"...we cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming”.

Performance making for her is an attempt to rehearse these future possibilities in real time and space. She believes fervently that the artist maginary can create new worlds.