Spine Party Movement Intensive
“Fear-No-sphere”
Fear-No-Sphere is a contemporary dance project of Spine Party Movement (under the direction of Nitipat Ong Pholchai) that continues to explore, through body movement, the question of how simple we can be, so that we reveal the beautiful sophistication of life and human interactions as rich phenomena.
The Whys:
Ong feels the needs to connect and contextualize the art of dance/movement into contemporary Asian societies which have rich music theater traditions and a curiosity for global culture.
Invoking our inner child through Games: game-based imprography…dance as an autonomous language for communicating, negotiating, and coming to terms with each other. Bringing back our inner child helps us learn better, be creative, be true to ourselves and make us open up for each other.
Open up new sites for dance…to go to public space, to let ourselves become part of the site, to envelop, to inhabit, to be site-specific. Open up new sources of inspiration. New way of making art by coming together into collaboration with live musician, using improvisational format, instead of compartmentalizing, commodifying resources.
By providing alternative platform and process for dance-making and sharing performing art, we offer self-critiques on our tendency to adhere to our habits (which close-down our choices) in a consumerist society and suggests ways to alternative possibilities.
We can explore, in a relaxed and safe environment, our vulnerability so that we overcome our limitation, our fear. Our hubris can be beautiful if we accept it and support each other.
The Hows
Witnessing the self interacting with the world through movement with sensitive awareness.
An individual’s process of perceptual construction the body as home (as metaphor for world views), expressing it, or shifting (via retelling, reinterpreting) and reconstructing it altogether via partnering and group work. The role of sound perception, various kinds of listening with the auditory-sonic-body, various kind of seeing and visual perception, into real-time composition.
Techniques of peaceful confrontation based on martial art philosophy. I will introduce the technical tools in sparring, qigong, capoeira, yoga, boxing, taichi, play fight, fighting monkey and contact improvisation. Not only that harmonious negotiation in a spiritual fight between sensitively listening bodies is beautiful, it can make our society a better place. You start looking at yourself and others with more compassion.
Meditative awareness of one’s impulse, welling up emotion, our way of giving meaning to a confrontational situation, how we make conscious choices.
How to share ourselves to public. Presence and Performativity through experiencing.
3-STAGE PROCESS
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“Home”: the core technical training of Spine Party Movement.
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The base that will build context for a healthy and intelligent body and nourish individual’s creative process
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I will use this training to address the dancing artists individually of what each can bring to the group, how they learn, grow from where they are at, how they help each other learn
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A container for truthful exploration, how to come back and becoming stronger artist every time and contribute oneself to the community and to art-making
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Playing surrendering with challenging games
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Games serves to expand your habits, and thus abilities
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Awareness is highly valued as tool for recalling events and making detours so that choreography can be placed, paving ways for “chance composition” and art-making
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Textual/Contextual writing
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LISTENING AND READING: Artists do reflections, involve their imaginations.
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As project facilitator, Ong will help extracting materials, forming, constructing a piece.
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Artists will be given tasks to make a piece and to collaborate
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REHEARSAL PLAN: 4-5 hours a day. (with a 15 min snack break): PERIOD is 5 days
1 hours for “Home” also serve as movement/technique class (BODY RESEARCH)
2 hours for Games: partnering, group awareness, improvisation, group composition, solo performativity (ARTISTIC PROCESS, TEAM BUILDING)
1 hours for text and choreography (CRITICAL THINKING/INSPIRATION)
On Day 7, we will perform a 20-mins performance
This workshop is for
….anyone with an interest in discovering about themselves in relation to others, a way to connect through the arts.
….artists and dancers who wants to expand their physical, mental and creative capacity through movement, to develop artistic tools to work with diverse group of people
(the workshop may be broken down to 1.5 hours of “Home” technical training as a drop-in class for BUSY people)
Bio:
Nitipat Ong Pholchai is a Thai dance artist, movement researcher, facilitator, and physics lecturer based in Bangkok. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Science and Technology (Applied Physics and Nano-engineering) from UC Berkeley. During his formative years in 2012-2013 he began training in modern dance, West African dance, ballet, contemporary techniques and was actively working with several performance companies in San Francisco. His movement practice is informed by Gaga, The Axis Syllabus, contact improvisation, internal martial arts, physical theater and somatic practices such as The Feldenkrais Method® and Body-Mind-Centering®.
After relocating to Bangkok in 2014, he has been developing his movement and dance research as the leader of the group “Spine Party Movement” with its educational branch “Contact Improvisation in BKK” that aims to publicize somatic education and body practices to public, both in the form of workshops and performances. Spine Party Movement has been sharing and presenting work in Thailand, Malaysia, India and the Netherlands. Ong has taught at Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur, and was selected as an emerging choreographer at SEA Choreolab 2015.
Ong’s body practice is based on somatic movement research, solo and partnered improvisational tasks, release/floor work and soft acrobatics. With his background studies in experiential anatomy, brain science, physics and martial art philosophy, Ong is also interested in improvised movement theater as a means for developing creative and formative sides of individuals, as well as working collaboratively. Workshops use multi-level class structure that combines the technically developed skills of the advance student with innocent and unemcumbered creative explorations of the raw beginner. The instructions are wide-ranging and covers different modes of the performing arts using improvisation as the source of discovery and development.
In 2016, Ong founded a community “Project C: Collaborative happening art for Creative Society” which aims to connect people across disciplines and serves as platform to support local artists to develop and share their artistic processes among each other and to the Thai public. Artists in Project C take turns leading open workshops and collaborate with each other for the showcase at the end of each period. We meet lots of new friends, have great dance and conversation with our audience along the way.
For more info about Ong’s work, please visit these pages
https://suiragno.wixsite.com/spineparty