Workshop Double Skin / Double Mind

The workshop Double Skin / Double Mind represents the basis of Emio Greco | PC’s creative work. This workshop through the years has developed a very clear structure in which participants are challenged to explore their own creativity by learning new ways of dealing with their bodies. Breathing, Jumping, Expanding, Reducing and Transfer are the words that describe the main parts of the workshop, in which body and mind cooperate to achieve a physical metamorphosis, melting the form of the movement with its intention.

Utmost concentration, extreme effort and physical exhaustion play important roles in the work of Emio Greco| PC. By moving on the boundaries of the achievable, the dancers lose control over the image of the movement. They find themselves in a state that not only transcends the social body, but also, in a sense, the private. Because of the organic development of the movement repertoire, the dancer cannot conceal himself by using decorative variations; he is forced to concentrate on how the movement comes into being and what differs each time it is made. The trancelike quality thus created can only be generated by a consciously agitating dancer and a highly lucid articulation of the body.

Fundamental to the choreographic work of EG | PC is the regaining of the body. The training that Greco and Scholten use is significant here. Using intense and lengthy breathing exercises as part of their ‘back to the body’ approach, the dancer is confronted with the specificity of the private body, the body as repository for countless influences: personal histories, psychological complexities, social frameworks, cultural-political reflexes, and so on. An awareness of the resonance in one’s own body is developed, to perceive oneself and to start to perceive the world around through the body.

The process set in motion by this training is described as a withdrawal, an inner reflection. It is made impossible for the dancer to explore solely the external form or to only make his body available (altruistically, noncommittally) for one use or the other. First, the diversity and instability of one’s own instrument, the body, must be investigated. Initially this can be disconcerting, but this preparation can actually empower the dancer to deal with the specifics in the body and to employ them, instead of being unconsciously regulated by them or covering them up.

Fransien van der Putt, air# Let’s suppose the Academy is a place for artists…

Accademia Mobile
In recent years, Emio Greco | PC’s nomadic mode of operating has led to unexpected questions and findings, to spontaneous ways of sharing pas¬sions, of creating and researching.

Launched in 2006 the Accademia Mobile gathers such questions under different formats (Exchange, Research and Dissemination) by initiating activities that venture into both an intercultural and interdisciplinary search for new connections on the fault line between education and artistic practice.

Central to the exchange activities is the development of new educational set-ups in which theory and praxis, transmission and creation can inform each other. The focus is on developing dance and the experiential knowledge of dance.
Within its short period of existence, the exchange has developed two different methods of operating that reflect the two different types of partnerships within this area of the Accademia Mobile. On the one hand there are the nomadic programmes that focus on the development of inspiring educational networks, with a special focus on the relationship between Europe and Asia, and on the other hand there are the programmes that follow up on the Company in the School format, in which the vision of the artists infiltrates in existing educational contexts.