Syllabus of a dance-architecture workshop at Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance on 29 September – 5 October 2003

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 Dance and Architecture have much in common.  Both are concerned with practices of space.  For a dancer the act of choreography as a writing of place occurs through the unfolding of spatial dimensions through gesture and embodied movement.  For the architect space is the medium through which form emerges and habitation is constructed. For both, the first space we experience is the space of the body.    The workshop considered the Centre as a site for exploring the feeling of space, and a target for architectural relations between the body and the built.   Over six days various techniques for heightening awareness of how we unfold, penetrate and challenge space through the body were explored. We became space through stillness.  In tracking the interior shifts of attention and awareness and inhibiting a desire to move we could feel the voids and solids, cavities and densities of our corporeal selves.  The movement awareness warm ups which followed, addressed different symmetries for spatial organization of the body such as radial symmetry.  In aligning these with understandings of the relationship between 2-D and 3-D design, different sequencing effects between space and body were researched through improvisation and interaction.   The dancer’s kinesphere or personal envelope of space was brought into new alignments with the properties of the built environment through touch.  In exploring the feeling of space through eyes closed research the dancers raised awareness of scale, dimension, texture and volume.  The language of sensation was thus a tool for navigating the architectural details of the Centre.   Compositional tasks were focused on animating the physical properties of the building, for example through drawing its architectural features through different body parts, inhabiting spaces, and de-familiarising its conventions.  We looked afresh at the Centre through our senses and we asked, what does it invite us to do?   Through embodied action notions of opening, placing and inhabiting were investigated.  Three methods for choreography as a writing of place arose from this research: The performative encounter as a route for negotiating site; marking place through retracing embedded histories; and installing ephemeral architectures.   In responding to the architecture of the site, the performers uncovered layers of embedded history and invented new trace-forms.  The centre became an ear for the body, listening to the movements of the dancers.  Architecture and anatomy traded places.  We passed messages between them.  The walls spoke.  We deciphered traces of past habitations by listening.  How did they dance here?  Does their story have a link to our body stories?  We made maps of our anatomy and we located body narratives, mapping moments of becoming to zones of the building, to openings, terraces, crevices and surfaces.  We let the building go silent and we listened to the leakage of the city.  We witnessed its neighbours on their nightwalks coming for the vista and for private moments of revelry.  Through this weft of found moments we wove a thread of connections between past and present, between languages and between bodies and the building blocks and stones of its history.   Through  our searches we came to find an outcome as a promenade performance. Visitors were invited into and directed through the center as site.  Gathering around an image of embodied action which heightens perception of a space, they completed this work with their attention holding us in the place of performance.   We gathered on the terrace as the sun sunk low in the sky above Athens and there we saw th
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