Lap Dance: A Private Dance | A workshop with the artist Dani Brown
*** THIS WORKSHOP IS 5 DAYS AND INCLUDES 23 HOURS OF INSTRUCTION
I have been fascinated by Lap Dance and what it has to offer contemporary performance since 2009. I approach the form as a microstructure to study the phenomenon of live art, and the potential of communication and exchange between performer and audience.
Lap Dance is highly sexualized according to commercial aesthetics and semiotics of sex and femininity. It can be discussed as a formalization of a semiotic body where gestures, movements, codes, and symbols of femininity are made use of to achieve a performed sexuality. As art and commercial entertainment are continuously melting into each other, I believe there is great potential to analyze, research, appropriate, and deconstruct such forms of entertainment. Please note that it is not my interest to question lap dance nor its implications, but rather to provoke the questions which lap dance can propose to performance, as well as to an audience regarding the economy and politics of privacy, intimacy, and the very organization of body and space in live art.
In this intensive, Lap Dance is appropriated and used as a microstructure to practically study choreographic and performance issues revolving around distance, touch, atmosphere, relation to sound, presence, presentation, eye gazing, and breath matching.
