17533
Practice seminar
SoSe 18: Bodies of Emotions
Lindy Annis
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Bodies of Emotions
The focus of the seminar is the intersection of art and science, of research and artistic creation, choreography. I plan to engage with the students in a process of collection and collage as a method of artistic creation and choreography. We will visit one or more museums of the city where we will collect body gestures and attitudes found in the art works. The discovered figures will be examined, recorded, compared and decoded. We will explore the language of the bodies we find – their emotional potential, cultural heritage and temporal immortality. We will spend time at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, looking at the paintings and the figures we find there. What are the bodies expressing, how, and in which contexts? We will work performatively in direct dialogue with the art at the museum. Following our visits to the museum, we will work in the studio with the material we have collected - these bodies with their emotions, gestures, attitudes. Here begins a process of experiments in reenactment, reanimation and choreographic collage. Photographs, print-outs etc. aid us in the recollection and organization of bodies and ideas - The images can be compiled and analyzed, compared, moved and interchanged. We will explore creating choreography using the collage-scores and image reenactments. How can the static images be reanimated into movement? Where do research and art intersect? How can found material be the basis of creation? What is the relationship between the iconographic poses and the contemporary situation – time, location, current politics and social environment?
This project is inspired by the work of Lady Emma Hamilton and her performances of ‘Attitudes’ at the end of the 18th century, as well as the art historian Aby Warburg and his research on emotional bodies in the arts and the afterlife of images.
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6 Class schedule
Regular appointments