STAGED ENCOUNTERS
Masterclass with Vera Tussing & JS Rafaeli

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

About Staged Encounters
For the last five years Vera has been busy with a cycle of work that she describes as the TACTILE CYCLE. Together with a team of performers and collaborators, she has explored how tactile encounters can be staged through different modes, methods, and materials. On stage, dance is admired at distance, while in the social world we experience dance up close: in the tactile cycle, she was curious about what happens when you take dance-for-stage but change the usual parameters of the theatrical space. What happens when the actions/the dance is experienced up close rather than seen from a distance? With this change of proximity comes a different kind of communication.
As part of this workshop Vera will give insights into the processes that she goes through with her collaborators in order awaken the sensitivity necessary to work in such close proximity. They will investigate how to deal with tactile dance-making as the 'creation felt experiences' rather the performance of touch; how to make contact with an individual audience member while remaining connected to the overall choreographic unfolding; how to notice and deal with rejection and refusal in a way that take audience members seriously as human beings who can choose to give or withhold consent. They will enter some of the scores that Ishe's been working with and discuss the issues that they raise, giving you an insight in the current stage of her practice.

About Vera Tussing
Vera Tussing graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School, and has worked as a dancer, director and creator throughout Belgium, the UK, Canada and across Europe over the last 10 years. In 2011 she premiered Trilogy with Albert Quesada before going on to make the stage pieces You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet (2012) 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, making the work accessible to blind and partially sighted audience members, premiered at CND in Paris. This piece is part of The Humane Body Project with ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Kaaitheater (Brussels) and The Place (London) as its partners. Both, Two, a duet in collaboration with Esse Vanderbruggen premièred at Kaaistudio's (Brussels) in 2018. 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. She is a KAAP Maker, Research Associate at South East Dance, part of IN-FINITY and an artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater Brussels.