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Amaya dance class12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() I must admit that neither did I share her enjoyment for the easy-going and self-contained music at first nor for the movements and gestures it inspired in my body - controlled, delicate, and indifferent. During the workshop, Sasha shared with us both her knowledge about baroque culture(s) and the fascination for its embodiment a fascination that is at the core of Sarabande’s creative process. The frontal orientation of the dancers facing each other is an element of baroque’s legacy, embodied and reproduced by many, but consciously acknowledged only by a few. In other words: The public now sits in the place once taken by royalty, whose fixed position forced the dance to be directed at them. One of the things I keep thinking about is the similarity of the dancer’s position, directly facing the sovereign in baroque performances of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in France 1, and frontally facing today’s audiences in theater halls. I am suggesting here an understanding of care meaning caring/carrying further - for instance through writing - as well as allowing ourselves to be transformed by what we care for. The starting points for this text are my cognitive and bodily memories as participant of the before-mentioned workshop, and as member of the audience in Sarabande, a dance performance choreographed by Sasha and performed at Sophiensaele in Berlin (January 8, 2020) and at Lake Studios (August 29, 2020). ![]() My hope is, therefore, not to give a final answer to issues as ambiguous as “care,” but to allow such ambiguity to affect my introspection and the development of further questions. In what follows, I want to respond to Sasha’s question in writing, based on an experience that is situated in and inscribed onto my body, but my words should remain open. ![]() One of the festival’s aims is to strengthen the notion of critical empathy embedded in performance, allowing the spectators to “submerge” into choreographic processes guided by the choreographers themselves. “How to take care of a dance piece?” Choreographer and dancer Sasha Amaya posed this question during her two-day workshop as part of the festival Submerge: Getting Into the Work at Lake Studios in Berlin (August 25–26, 2020), and she repeated it in a conversation we had days later. Image reproduced with the permission of the artist. ![]()
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