Formless Selfies: A Process Lab

By looking through the lens of the ubiquitous selfie we can see without naming, becoming formless and finding pleasure in new states of visual being. Using improvisation, somatic choreographic score instructions and mobile phones as departure strategies we will create and discuss, pushing toward boundaries as movers and thinkers, drawing on each other’s tools to challenge individual identity in an attempt to become formless as a group of Selfies.

Does movement become more important then the form of Self? Why do we love taking and viewing photos of faces? How can we—individually and together—liberate ourselves from our selfies? Do we want to become formless? What kind of formless identities will we create alone, one-to-one and as a group? What does it mean to become formless in the real of selfie-culture?

This Process Lab allows for a dynamic exchange between participants from diverse fields of artistic practice. The workshop will through the use of technological devices bring each of us —and our body and mind—into a formless state that allows new forms to emerge aligning with the idea of The Imperceptible Self. For artists in the field of dance, visual art, improvisation, somatic and new media movement based art. All Levels. Advanced registration is required.

 
Andrea Haenggi (CH/USA) is a dance-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer, improviser and teacher in Brooklyn, New York. She is the catalyst of the ephemerally activist driven performative art project 1067 PacificPeople, a 5-year project (2013-18) in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her artistic practice looks into power, exchange, value, feminism, ecology, history and death in the digital age. Her artistic works, spanning from big spectacles to quiet solos to public interventions to happenings to installation to videos has been presented in New York City and around the world, including Storefront for Art and Architecture/IDEAS CITY, Queens Museum, World Financial Center Arts & Events, Dance Theater Workshop, LMCC Sitelines Festival; MASS MoCA, in North Adams; Boston Cyberarts Festival in Bosten; Tanzhaus Zurich in Switzerland; the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia and at SPAN in Lagos, Nigeria. Haenggi has received many grants including the Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Price in 2008, an Artists Research and Media (ARM) Fellow from DTW in 2006 and a Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant in 2005. She has taught somatic-dance workshops with visual art concepts in the USA, China, Nigeria, and Switzerland and is on the faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in NY.