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Course Description

Summary

In this course we will make a dance, directed by achugar, and perform it at the end of the semester. It is for students with a deep awareness of their bodies in movement and with prior experience performing onstage and being part of a creative dance process, that are interested in being challenged as performers with a rigorous rehearsal process. This work will further explore the relationships between labor and dance; effort and pleasure; repetition and ritual; and ultimately body-magic and the space of no time-time that have long informed achugar’s body of work.  During the class we will learn dance material from achugar, and we will also explore through play and improvisation to create as a group. We will also engage in achugar’s practice of being in pleasure as a way to connect to a more liberated, empowered and “uncivilized” state. Students are expected to be open to touch and being touched, and we will work together to create an environment to feel safe to do so.  There is within the ideology of this class, and achugar’s work, the proposition that the making of a dance is not a creation of a commodity to be delivered to an audience as a consumer. Thus, the work is created as a way to grow ourselves a magical, utopian, empowered, liberated body; a process as a way of healing and becoming that is shared with the audience as a ritual and a celebration of this healing and becoming new. We will become our "Brujx" selves! (In Spanish: witches of any or all genders).  It is important to note that this process entails physical rigor and hard work, yet, it is not about abusing the body; it is to find liberation through the rigor by continuing to listen to our bodies’ needs and cues, to reach new states of being.