STRANGE NATURE
WITH HANA VAN DER KOLK AND LEA KIEFFER
OCTOBER 25 - NOVEMBER 1
Calling all dancers, artists, writers, schemers, activists, healers, and other freaks for a week-long dive into world-building, material intimacies/object oriented disorientation, monstrous becoming, temple configuring, psycho-physical interruptions/expansions, gentle and excessive adornment, and celebration.
Through body/flesh, attention, and imagination-centering practices, work with textiles, objects, space, and costume, and group ritual we will “dialogue” with ourselves, one another, and everything to ask: how and why might we become more tender, more monstrous, more clairvoyant, more fluid; recognizing/uncovering our already multiple, hybrid, contradictory, messy, monstrous selves, groupings, world in the process. While our collective intention will be with experience for experience’s sake, individuals may find themselves drawn to thread aspects of our work together into independent projects within and/or after the workshop in the form of costumes, performance, writing, socio-political proposals, pedagogy and more.
We will invite a particular focus with this 2023 emulsification of Strange Nature on/with/inside water, the shapeshifter, the monstrous, the thread/braid, and the temple (within and without).
Guided by dancers, makers, researchers, facilitators Lea Kieffer and Hana van der Kolk, Strange Nature began at the Field Center in 2022 with the curatorial and match making vision of Jared Williams. Lea and Hana have gone on to deepen the SN research with a research period and workshop in Berlin in 2023. October 25-November 1, 2023 Strange Nature finds its next constellation at the Field Center. Will you join us?
BIPOC scholarships, payment plans, and work study available.
SCHOLARSHIP + WORK TRADE
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We offer 3 full scholarships for Black, Indigenous and People of Color [BIPOC] folks in each session. As well as 3 Work Trade spots in each session. If interested please select 'BIPOC Scholarship' OR 'Work Trade' when registering via the link below. For more information about the work trade exchange, go to the Work Exchange page.
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Lea Kieffer is a French, Berlin based performer, dance artist, and costume/clothing maker. Her work explores processes of transformation and the dialogue between imagination and physicality through dance, bodywork and craftsmanship in hybrid and transdisciplinary formats. Her dance is influenced by a background in sports and crafts and a postmodern dance education based on improvisation, especially contact improvisation and somatic practices. From this collection of knowledge, she has built a practice of performing for others, performing improvisation, building her own performances, teaching and research through somatic practices and through making clothes and costumes for the stage. All of her practices are rooted in developing new narratives for the body and for movement with a specific inspiration from science fiction, and action movies and B-rated movies. Her current research « Sci fi anatomy » is a hybrid performance-workshop that creates dialogue between the matter of the body and the sea of our thoughts. Since 2012, she has created with partner of crimes Rocio Marano, under the identity of Los(t) Ninjas, multimedia performances ( “Matter of Blood”,” Blind Date (Literally)”, workshops “Los(t) Ninjas Practice” and shares the adventure of life. In the last year, she worked as performer and costume maker for Frida Giulia Franceschini “Tricks for gold”, Yuko Kaseki & Teo Vlad in “ CUNTethiques & SQUATconstellations”, Lee Meir & André Lewski in “von Hier nach Dort”. As a performer, she worked with Jared Gradinger & Angela Schubot, Jeremy Shaw, Isabel Lewis, K.A.U. & Wdovick among others. She also sometimes embraces focusing on costumes and scenographies like for “Storlaut” and “Menstrual Metal” by Jule Flierl, “Caring Banquise” by Mathilde Monfreux and “Salutations Mistinguette”by Stephanie Auberville.
Hana van der Kolk is a queer dancer, artist, educator, writer, Internal Family Systems-based guide, sex and gender expansion worker, and facilitator of events and spaces based on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee lands in the Hudson Valley, New York. Hana is made by these lands and by the lands of Massachusetts, Vermont, Southern California, and the Netherlands, where their parents and grandparents are from. Hana’s work is collaborative, body-centered, and emerges from curiosity about care, contradiction, multiplicity, reckoning and reparations, joy/grief, eros, and attention to humans’ porous and weblike natures. It straddles art and performance, socio-political inquiry, pedagogy, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation, and manifests as performances, workshops, one-on-one counseling, sex and gender expansion work, events/curation, writing, videos, and gifts, sites, and costumes. Hana sees creative, body-based work/play in these many forms as conduits for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for re-membering intimacy at many proximities.
Hana has worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist since 2001, and currently collaborates/has collaborated with Erica Dawn Lyle, Tomislav Feller, Lea Keiffer, Eli Nixon, Adam Tinkle, Erin Sickler, Angela Beallor, Elizabeth Press, Senem Pirler, Lailye Weidman, taisha paggett, Sean Desiree, Jason Martin, Asher Woodworth, Ellen Foster, and many others. They hold an MFA in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and a PhD from the Art Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, are a longtime student of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and are trained in the Internal Family Systems and Urban Tantra. More at www.hanavanderkolk.com.
