Accademia Mobile Exchange
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.

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…

Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten have collaborated in their joint search for new dance forms since 1995. They found a strong common interest in the possibility of a dance seen as the expression of a visionary body, with the theatrical space as the external influence on that body. In their performances, dance is regarded as autonomous, and capable of creating its own time and space. Dance is never brought into action as a medium for conveying, nor for dressing a theatrical space. Instead, dance is perceived as possessing an inherent logic, by which it is able to express the intelligence of the body without needing the addition of meaning or explication. All the elements of a performance – the space, the lighting, the sound – are applied throughout the working process with a view to eliciting from the body the impulses that are driving its self-examination.

Bertha Bermúdez Pascual (researcher & Artistic Coordinator of the Accademia Mobile) was Prix de Lausanne laureate in 1992. After her dance education in Pamplona she continued with professional studies at the Rudra Béjart Dance School in Lausanne and the John Cranko School in Stuttgart. Between 1993 and 1996 she was a member of the Frankfurt Ballet and then joined Compañia Nacional de Danza in Madrid. She has performed in productions by a.o. William Forsythe, Nacho Duato, Jirí Kylián, Ohad Naharin and Hans van Manen. Bermúdez Pascual joined Emio Greco | PC in 1998 and has performed in most of their works. In 2005 she stopped performing and started working for EG | PC transmitting their work and doing research around dance notation. She is responsible for the notation project coordination.

ICKamsterdam
The International Choreographic Arts Centre Amsterdam led by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten was officially launched in January 2009. Dance company Emio Greco | PC has thus found a roof for all activities it has unfolded since its establishment in 1996. In addition to the now internationally acclaimed dance productions, these activities include stimulating of dance research, providing space for research performances, opening dialogues with other artists, offering workshops, lectures and educational programmes, keeping up the repertoire and issuing publications.

ICKamsterdam offers the opportunity to work on research and development. Central to it are the research, the dialogue and indeed the confrontation with and between the invited makers. It is an open meeting place for Dutch and foreign artists as temporary guests: a welcoming, supportive place that is in constant evolution due to the temporary injections of ‘the strange element’. A good place to stay, open to creation, observation, analysis, development and reflection.

In keeping with this, ICKamsterdam positions itself in a local, national and international context. The centre, the residents and guests play an active role in the network of Amsterdam artists and art institutions, the projects enjoys a firm national and international distribution and collaborative relations with foreign artists and organizations are inherent in the operation of the centre.

ICKamsterdam is the place where productions are created indoors that will subsequently reach out to a wider audience out of doors – on stages nationally and abroad. Moreover, ICKamsterdam is also the laboratory, the nursery that every art form has need of. The doors are always open and public presentations and events form a regular part of the schedule.