Glorious Antinomies – Open-Level Improvisational Dance Practice

Course Description

Summary

To Do or Not To Do?
The decision itself is already a mystery.
Moments of choice are often ambiguous, unstable, and uncomfortable—yet full of possibility. This course approaches improvisation as a laboratory for investigating the emergence of movement, subjectivity, and choreography.

The question is not simply whether to act, but how an action begins to take shape. Before intention becomes clear lies a fluctuating territory of ambiguity, hesitation, contradiction, and uncertainty. This course explores that territory.

Through the tension between embodiment and disembodiment, students investigate how actions emerge. Imagine standing in a dining hall unable to decide between a hamburger and a pizza—wanting both, yet unable to choose. In this course, we call this a positive antinomy of embodiment: competing desires draw us toward incompatible choices. If neither option evokes a sense of desire or personal involvement, a different tension arises between the demand to choose and the absence of a felt connection to either choice. We approach this as a negative antinomy of disembodiment. Here, “positive” and “negative” describe contrasting modes of engagement rather than judgments of value. As these states shift and intertwine, a decision may begin to emerge. Choosing neither and simply walking away is also a form of emergence.
Throughout the semester, students engage in movement scores, partner practices, object-based explorations, memory compositions, instruction-based dances, collective improvisations, and choreographic experiments. Rather than learning a fixed vocabulary of movement, they investigate systems that generate movement under changing physical, perceptual, and social conditions.

Movement is understood not as the expression of a stable individual subject, but as something that arises through relationships among bodies, objects, perception, memory, space, and situation. Disembodiment is approached not as the absence of experience, but as a productive condition in which perception, action, memory, and identity no longer fully coincide. Within these gaps, unexpected possibilities arise and movement begins to take shape.

Drawing inspiration from William Forsythe, Yoko Ono, tea ceremony, renga (collaborative linked poetry), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Drumming, and the proposition “Objects May Be Freer Than We Are,” students investigate multiple pathways through which movement, perception, and choreography emerge. Particular attention is given to unstable subjectivity, distributed agency, and the relationship between perception and action.

Improvisation is treated as an experimental field where decisions, accidents, and unexpected transitions continually reorganize relationships among bodies, objects, space, and time. Structured improvisations and open explorations cultivate spatial awareness, responsiveness, relational sensitivity, and the ability to remain within uncertainty. Particular emphasis is placed on how individual experiences, perceptions, and actions enter into relation with one another, giving rise to temporary communities and collective choreographies.

This course is open to all levels.

By the end of the course, students will have developed practical improvisational tools together with a deeper capacity to perceive how movement, subjectivity, choreography, and temporary communities emerge through embodied experience. They may also come to recognize uncertainty not as something to overcome, but as a condition from which choreography can emerge.