Human Animal

“What makes us human?” is one of the main questions upon which the project is founded. The materials, games, and principles behind our practice represent our continuous search for the answer.

“Human Animal” is an initiative designed to foster creative exploration at the intersection of sports and the arts. Our goal is to establish an environment where we actively promote learning, problem-solving, and effective communication.

During this workshop, we will explore the landscape of our bodies, breaking down barriers between disciplines to develop a better understanding of ourselves. By analyzing human locomotion, we will integrate elements from various disciplines such as dancing, martial arts, and athletics, thus developing a more responsive and adaptable organism.

Workshop Content

1. Forms:

Somatic Practice: Developing better awareness and learning how to regulate our internal state through mindful movement.

Efficient Configurations: Learning how to tune our joints to the same scale for harmonic movement to emerge, aiming for better structural organization.

 Know The Body: Expand your understanding of the body to create patterns based on your individual needs. 

2. Improvisation:

Where everything comes together. Freedom is experienced when a sense of endless possibilities is achieved, and imaginative exploration brings ideas into being. How does stable performance arise from playful exploration? How do we develop the capacity to adapt and create new pathways as we engage with a task? How do we create new tasks that bring us closer to our desires, our fantasies about the kind of movers we want to be? Who are we as individuals, as movers? Such questions are addressed in this area of our practice, where order emerges from chaos. 

3. Co-ordination:

Through whole-body, multi-plane, multi-joint movements, both on two feet and in quadrupedal positions, we will learn to move dynamically through space in a more economical manner. Coordination is a brain puzzle that challenges the motor system to adapt, creating new pathways and refining our ability to move with precision. As we engage with increasingly complex patterns and sequences, our awareness of timing, rhythm, and spatial relationships deepens, allowing us to navigate movement challenges with greater ease, to become better learners.  

4. Movement Scenarios & Games:

In this area, we will explore a variety of body-to-body and body-to-object scenarios, each of them teaching us something new, raising a new problem: provoking and stimulating us to listen, respond, adapt, communicate, think tactically, and come up with both efficient and creative solutions. Our capacity to connect and communicate with the environment can be shaped through our practice. Our perception and the invitations for action we see, both in the physical as well as the social realms of the environment, can be expanded through practice. Through play, we open the gates of perception for new meanings to emerge and shape the experience of the self and the world. 

Level: Open for all levels and backgrounds.

Reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions regarding the workshop.