Stay tuned for workshops during spring 2024.
Archive:
Anna Nowicka
Anna Nowicka (Berlin) is choreographer and performer, plunging into the lush reality of dreaming. She researches the potential of images to expand the body into a state of a continuous becoming. Graduate of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), MA Choreography at the HfS Ernst-Busch / HZT in Berlin and MA Psychology at the Warsaw University, she wrote her practice based PhD on embodied awareness as the foundation for being present. She has completed a basic training in Systemic Therapy. Anna’s research has been repeatedly recognized. She was awarded the DAAD Prize, followed by the choreographic scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Tanzstipendium from the city of Berlin, scholarship from the Gwaertler Foundation and most recently, Tanzpraxis Scholarship from the city of Berlin. Her solo: “the truth is just a plain picture. said bob.” was selected for the Polish Dance Platform, Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and Polish-Israeli Dance Platform in Tel Aviv. „Raw Light” (2017) was chosen to be part of the Polish Dance Network, and “This Is The Real Thing” (2018) opened the Polish Dance Platform in 2019. Her most recent work – „Eye Sea” premiered in December 2019 in HAU, Berlin. Since 2010 her individual choreographic practice is connected with the Art Stations Foundation. Anna is a certified Saphire® teacher of dr. Catherine Shainberg’s “The School of Images”. She is unfolding dreamwork through an intensive exchange with dr. Bonnie Buckner.
Anna Nowicka describes her workshop:
“The opening” combines elements of a workshop and a participatory performance on how to instantly transform night dreams into choreographic situations, cultivating a sense of community, intimacy, and openness. It is a practical, accessible format that gives insight into my artistic practice.
In the workshop we will explore our unique languages of imagination. We will notice how images move us, and how our actions transform inner landscapes. We will shift perspectives, switch between giving and receiving, doing and observing, dancing and being still. With the help of shifting the eye within and without the body, we will build realities and let go of them, draw inner landscapes and quest into their mysteries. We will speak worlds into being and listen to how they resonate in the body. From this receptive place, we will form our unique dances.
The practice I propose is rooted in ancient wisdom teachings around working with dreams and spontaneous imagination. I studied this lineage of work for the past 13 years at “The School of Images,” and over 10 years with Dr. Bonnie Buckner. I am a certified practitioner, with a long expertise of applying this technique to performance, choreography, higher art education, individual coaching, and creative work with children.
In the workshop, we will plunge into “opening” any image, situation, and form, responding to it from a place of rested, attentive awareness. We will explore night dreams, and dreams that arise in waking reality. We will embody singular images, develop their specific qualities, states they induce and dances they jolt. We will follow the way in which they expand into narratives, using storylines as prompts to flow between qualities and shape shift with ease. We will go deeper into working with patterns, acknowledging the role of time and space in bringing materials to forms. Questions will prompt poetic ways of composing, weaving movements in an associative manner, fostering connections between seemingly unfamiliar materials. Questions will take us beyond the surface level understanding of a dream to reveal its deeper meaning.
The aim of this work is to become present, dancing with reality with curiosity and ease. With this experiential, deeply embodied perspective one becomes a response-able agent of creation, dreaming the world into being.
