Aimed at professionals who want to learn more on how to approach audience interaction in a dance performance.  Through case studies of her works T-Dancer, Palm of Your Hand and Mazing, Tussing will explore the following topics more in depth:

– Dancing with people / Dancing at people
– Consensus – Negotiation in Performance
– Performing touch – versus felt experiences

Tickets can also be purchased on Friday at the Festival’s Info Desk. Please note that payment there will only be possible in cash and not by card.

About Vera Tussing:

Vera Tussing graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School, and has worked as a choreographer, creator and dancer throughout Belgium, the UK and Europe. In 2011 she created Trilogy in collaboration with Albert Quesada, before going on to make the stage pieces You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet (2011) and T-Dance (2014), and the movement- sound installation Sound Bed. The performance,The Palm of Your Hand premiered in 2015 and Mazing in November 2016. In 2017 a recreation of The Palm of Your Hand#2 that opens the work for blind and partially sighted audience members will premiere at CND in Paris. A central theme of Vera’s work is how the different senses combine to structure our perception, and the creation of unique, inter-personal encounters between audience and performer.

https://veratussing.wixsite.com/mysite

About her work:

T-Dancer
This is a performance exploring touch and connection. How touch connects us: different types of touch, different types of connectionIt springs from a desire to touch and to be touched. To explore what touch means, and how we are connected. To experience one’s ability to be affected by what one perceives. Four dancers explore empathy and physical memory, questioning the limits of the body, and the mind’s connections. Without ever leaving their seats, the audience members are called to inhabit the same imaginative space as the performers in an invitation to experience empathetic, imagined touch.

The Palm of Your Hand
The Palm of Your Hand is a dance that takes place in the active, engaged, tactile negotiation between performer and audience – in their tacit agreement and understanding. Arranged in their ellipse, the audience themselves form the bounds of the theatrical space. This is a journey that, by definition, performer and audience discover and create together.

Mazing
What does it mean to be together in 2016? (2018?) In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re-affirming the power of touch in the digital age. Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact.