Reading and Dancing in the Dark Days
13-17 February the Master’s programme in Choreography at SKH hosts readings and dancing from morning until evening at MDT. The event is a chance to hang out and do stuff together. The important part is to show up, to make time, to take the bus, to put on your shoes. You are welcome for one day, every day, or even just one hour.
Winter is hard and winter is dark and the general tactic for survival is that we send our energy down into our tap roots and await the sun. The problem is that we are not exactly plants and we need other things to survive this deep, enforced communion with darkness.
Reading and Dancing in the Dark Days is an invitation to a week-long gathering together around the hearth of the theatre machine. Reading and dancing will be our main activities for exploring how we can nurture our curiosities both together and alone-together.
MDT will be used as a place to inhabit and invest with our collective study. Using the presence of others and the frame of the theatre, we can ride out the moment of the year when the darkness seems intolerable and begins to masquerade as a part of our souls.
Program
There will be a central program of led-dancing mornings, suggested study and reading afternoons, and evening activities that pay formal attention to the daily transition to darkness. Our proposal is that the generated central heat of group study can also sustain peripheral individual pursuits (we could also call this hanging out.) You are invited to join in or just come and profit from the warmth.
The week will be structured through the passage of time:
- 10:00-12:00: Morning dancing
- 13:00-16:00: Afternoon study
- 18:00-20:30: Sundown ritual and evening activity
This will be the baseline of the day, a center that permits a periphery to grow and perhaps take over. This periphery can be whatever you need /want to do but do not manage to do alone: reading, delving deeper into a study, self-soothing crafting, furious manifesto writing, cleaning your computer, napping, gossiping, spying, tending to something fragile, agitating for change etc.
The students in the MA in choreography, Head of Programme Jennifer Lacey and some lovely guests will plan for providing central events, the hearth around which we gather.
We will see what shows up as we attend to the micro-lengthening of each day.
The exact schedule will be updated during the week, stay tuned on the Facebook event:
FInd out more about the Master's Programme in Choreography at SKH