“We are all teachers and we are all learners. In workshops I try to create an environment where people feel safe and free enough to take risks. Every workshop is a unique opportunity for discovery and expression. It is a place where you meet yourself. Ultimately it is all about love.”
Nigel Charnock
Kulczyk Foundation invites to a spring’s workshop must! – a week-long coaching project for advanced, professional dancers and choreographers with the legendary Nigel Charnock, the co-creator of the DV8 and, most of all, an outstanding performer, choreographer and improviser.
Nigel Charnock’s workshop work is based on over twenty years of teaching experience and a passionate sense of the now. He creates an opened, free, nonetheless, challenging space, in which people are encouraged, stimulated and inspired to free their bodies and voices. This is a space in which anything and everything could happen.
The first hour of workshops is a fun, energetic warm-up, accompanied by equally energetic and loud music. The next step is usually devoted to simple movement tasks aimed at evoking physical and emotional release. Once the body and voice are opened and released, there comes the time for structured improvisation, which in turn, should lead to the development of the feelings of freedom and fearless abandonment.
Although, the very process is more important than the final product, the effects of the workshop work, will be visible during an informal performance after the workshop (Saturday, 5.04.2008).
Amazing. So mad and beautiful. I’ve learned so much about myself.
Itay / Israel
I thought I was going to die! It was great!
Barbara / Canada
It was so inspiring! Thank you! I cried a lot and laughed even more
Anna / Italy
Nigel Charnock – dancer, choreographer, actor, film director and playwright, a legendary member and co-founder of DV8 Physical Theatre. Educated as an actor, he then turned to dancing and performed at the London School of Contemporary Dance. His career began in 1982 at the Extemporary Dance Theatre. In 1986 together with Lloyd Newson he established the cult British DV8 Physical Theatre, where he produced such shows as Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (for which he received the London Performance Award in 1990), or Strange Fish, staged all around the world and filmed by David Hinton for BBC 2. After the departure from DV8 Charnock cooperated with various European artists and theaters: VOLCANO THEATRE COMPANY (L.O.V.E., The Message and How to Live, Macbeth), the Danish TIN BOX theater (Me Myself I, Crying Out Loud and Crush Test, Heaven), RICOCHET DANCE COMPANY (5ive Part One), COMPANHIA INSTAVEL (Too Much is Not Enough), Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company, whose director he was for 3 years (The Big Because, Intelligence of the Heart, Baby and #777 – A love story, Life, and First Sex & The White Room), Tanz Theater in Vienna (Meaty).
He is best known, though, for his solo projects. His major works are: Resurrection (1991); Original Sin (1993); Hell Bent (1994 – 1995); Heroine (1995) – inspired with the life and work of Billie Holiday; Second Coming (1995) – an amalgamation of the earlier trilogy Resurrection, Original Sin and Hell Bent; Human Being (1999) and Frank (2005).
In 1995 he set up Nigel Charnock + Company.
Nigel Charnock Described by the European press as “the poet of the body and the dancer of words”, “the virtuoso of provocative physical theatre” (The Independent), “a 20th century response to Lord Byron” (The Guardian). He has reached mastery of smooth transition between dance to theater, which he achieves by abandoning traditional understandings of individual genres. His work is a fusion of elements derived from various artistic forms – it is a synthesis of movement, word, music, dance, and lately also film. His productions are original mixtures of specific (British) sense of humor, pure wild fun and black comedy. His choreographies are in the main centered around the themes of sex, love, God and death.
Another fascination of Charnock’s is improvisation, with which he creates crude theater, one that knows no limits and no fear. Every single of his improvised performances is a unique, unrepeatable experience both for the dancers as well as the audience. Each of these shows can be witnessed only once. Once it is staged, it happens for the first and the last time. Charnock tears to pieces the established boundaries of a dance spectacle, continually exploring and pushing forward dance as a genre and combining various disciplines and different media.