The contents of the lecture-conferences reflect the key themes of the scientific, empirical and anthropological research on the body carried out within the Axis Syllabus Network. They represent opportunities for learning and reflecting together. The lecture-conferences will also be broadcasted online to keep its content available to a wider audience, while the performance shows will remain exclusive to those present on site, to remember the right value and importance of human presence and hand-to-hand dialogue, heart to heart with the public.

Within or beyond the limit

When creating dances, the artist makes esthetic and semiotic choices. In art, equilibrium/moderation is often a synonym for beauty. Because of this, excess has the fascination of a tabu.

Which are the parameters that define and make excess so captivating?

How do we know that we have crossed the limit to disequilibrium?

Has equilibrium/moderation become passé?

As dancers and choreographers the speakers will share the way these choices occur, explain how they contribute to the message conveyed by the dance piece and expand on the what risks certain choices have entailed/engendered, for them and for the audience.

Dance and Science

Connecting science to art is not new. It often happens that we cultivate expectations towards the dancer as the one who defies the laws of physics, biology, mechanics.

How does the dancer cope with these expectations?

How does the preparation of a dancer take place today?

In a hypothetical dialogue, what are the demands that science would make to dance and what would be the demands of dance towards science? What concrete good can anyone derive from the knowledge of the dancer? The speakers will share perspectives from over 30 years of experience as dancers, performers and pedagogues.

Different bodies, different strategies

Our bodies are different. Some of the characteristics that distinguish us are seen, others are felt.

What are the paradigms that unite us and what distinguishes us? What are the limits and the possibilities that follow? How can diversity facilitate the learning process and contribute to progress?

The speakers will share reflections, experiences, strategies, failures and successes. Questions from the public will be given priority.

Gravity, threat or opportunity?

Gravi from the Latin means heavy. The force of gravity is a universal force that acts on everything in the universe. We experience it through any object or body with a mass that falls downwards. The work of the dancer could be summed up in instructing the body to tame, indulge or exploit this merciless force to its advantage.

The speakers will talk about the role that gravity plays during the process of creating a work. What limits does gravity place on the human being? Is there any hidden potential? How can the dancing artist teach us to access it and why could this knowledge affect us all?