Somatics into Tango: Four Workshops on Dance Awareness
Festival Tango Contamination, Maison du Mouvement, Strasbourg (FR) 19-21 August 2022
These workshops are a journey into the heart of perception. Raffaele guides us to find out how to invite the body's intelligence, and let it contaminate our presence and our dance.
TRAINING DESCRIPTION:
What is the Tango if not a dance that puts us on the threshold of the other through the gentle and empowering experience of touch? And it makes us feel confident and playful in not knowing until the very last moment what we are going to do - and what the other will do? During the festival Raffaele Rufo will share an interdisciplinary approach that is the result of a long and in-depth process of research and contamination of Argentine Tango with Contact Improvisation, Dance Theatre and other contemporary forms of improvisational dance. Participants will be guided through a perceptual journey in which somatic listening and improvisational attention create the possibility of feeling oneself in the feeling of the other and inhabiting the transformative spaces between touching and being touched, moving and being moved, dancing and being danced.
Workshop #1: the tango connection: feeling into the other
How to feel my body without losing the connection with the other and feel the other without losing the connection with my body by playing with touch, weight and the axis of movement.
Workshop #2 TANGO SPIRALS: Following the CURVES of the Body
How to find a connection with the spirals of my body and of my partner's body and co-create a synergy between our spirals by rotating the axis around stable and moving points of contacts.
Workshop#3: The Somatic Secrets of Dancing a Milonga
How to find a balance between following the rhythm of the music and following the rhythm of the other and find momentum together by playing with changes of speed and repetition.
Workshop #4: Negotiating Roles and Energies in Queer Tango
How to face social conditionings on femininity and masculinity and adapt roles to what emerges somatically in the dance by playing with reciprocity (we are both giving and receiving at the same time) and asymmetry (we are not giving and receiving the same thing in the same way)
LOCATION:
La Maison du Mouvement, 75 route de Schirmeck, 67200 Strasbourg-Koenigshoffen
BOOKINGS AND INFOS:
https://tangodyssee.com/tango-contamination/
FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS:
“It was a beautiful excursion into the liquidity of resonance and dissonance, the approach, meeting, resistances and dissolution into flow of contact and partnership. It is equally luscious to feel the rub of resistance as it is the melding and fusing of flow. I’m eager to experience more! Thank you!”
TEACHER’S BIO:
Raffaele Rufo (PhD) is a dance and movement artist and educator, and a scholar of sensory perception. Raffaele has developed his career by travelling across Europe, Africa and Australia for more than two decades. In the early 2000s, Raffaele lived in Senegal where he studied the West African tradition of dance and percussion (with the N'Diaye griot family of Louga). In 2004, he moved to Melbourne where he collaborated with the theatre research and experimentation ensemble "Liminal", engaging the contamination between Western and Asian principles to explore the heightened perceptiveness of the actors. In 2008, Raffaele returned to Italy where he engaged in Tango with various masters of the Argentine tradition and joined the dance company "EfectoTango" (directed by Alejandro Angelica). He then developed his teaching practice and created his first Tango works between dance and theatre: "Mi Chiamo Tango" (2013), "La Muñeca" (2015) and "Astor Tango" (2015). Rewarded with an Australian government scholarship, Raffaele obtained his research doctorate from Deakin University (2015-2019). He trained also in Contact-Impro, and various contemporary forms of improvised dance (Body Weather) and somatic movement (Feldenkrais method).
Raffaele develops a process of investigation of sensory perception in Tango at the border between the interiority of the dancers and their openness to the world. He taught his approach to improvisational dance at the “International Festival of Contact Improvisation and Tango" in Wuppertal (Germany) in 2018 and 2020 and at the "Solo and Contact Improvisation Festival" in Tyrol (Austria) in 2021. He now lives in Ostia (on the Roman coast), where he collaborates with the nascent theatre research ensemble “Humanitas Mundi” in search of somatic, poetic and dramaturgical intertwining between the Tango and the larger landscape of the performing arts.
Since 2020, he has been developing a practice of ecosomatic dance, extending the study of perception to the relationship of sensory reciprocity between the body and nature.
For more information : www.raffaelerufo.com
Email: raffaele.rufo@gmail.com