This summer, I flew to Berlin for the b12 festival for contemporary dance and performance art and left a completely different dancer. I attended six workshops taught by international artists, saw dance film screenings, viewed b12 performance projects and pieces by workshop instructors, watched avant-garde German performance art, and made dozens of friends who are dancing and choreographing in every corner of the world. The work I saw and participated in throughout the festival had a transformative impact on me, and will surely affect the way I view, create, and experience dance moving forward.
b12 was created five years ago with the goal of building an international hub for dance artists with a deep interest in movement research. It has quickly become a sensation—drawing hundreds of international movers every year. The festival stretches over a month, and over 60 international dance artists and researchers teach workshops that are 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 days in length. Dancers at b12 create their own schedules based on their interests, and I chose to attend six workshops that focused on floorwork, physicality, and choreography.
At the beginning of the festival, I worked with Luke Jessop—an artistic director from the U.K.—and explored challenging street dance principles, explosive dynamics, and complicated inversions. After working with Victor Rottier, an artist from the Netherlands, I learned to frame dance through four major principles—accents, time, rhythm, and flow—and how to pick up significant amounts of material at lightning speed. I built contact improvisation concepts into partnering choreography with Barcelona-based dancers Guy Nader and Maria Campos for four days, and spent two days with German choreographer Nadine Gerspacher, who pushed my physical endurance and aerobic limits in continuously moving sessions.
Fabian Wixe, a Serbian artist, exposed me to David Zambrano’s research as well as “flying low” and “passing through” techniques. Fabian held his dancers to exceptionally high standards, and his demands of my physicality and engagement trained me to notice detail, maintain complete mental and physical availability for hours on end, and take constant inventory of my body. His insistence on moving at breakneck speeds and sustaining perfect precision gave me access to a world of movement qualities of which I didn’t know I was capable. The movement generation exercises he taught us were originally created as ways for him to construct distinctive material in times when inspiration failed; participating in these exercises sent me home with a full notebook and a dozen exercises I’m thrilled to add to my choreographic toolkit.
I closed the festival with an eight-day workshop with Tom Weksler, an artist from Israel, and his partner Roser Tutusaus. Their collaborative research, coined movement archery, is based on physical principles like weight pouring, hip positioning, momentum generation and diminution, and interpersonal communication. Combined, these principles create an acrobatic yet meditative
movement style. At the end of this workshop, I saw an obvious change in my phrase material—I was able to incorporate momentum, spatial attentiveness, and a broad physical range more organically.
b12 breathed new life into my dancing and creative process. It was transformative to immerse myself in learning, physicalizing, and seeing work with movement languages I had not been exposed to before coming to Europe, and it gave me countless ideas for the dance and movement studies thesis I’m choreographing this year. I would highly recommend this festival to anyone looking to expose themselves to new movement vocabularies and to broaden their choreographic toolkit, physical range, and international dance connections. I left this festival a completely different dancer, choreographer, and creative mind with access to physical languages and movement ideologies that I would have never discovered if it weren't for b12.
Note: A big shout out to Friends of Dance for their work and support in making these experiences accessible to me and other Emory dancers!
