OPEN CALL: Dancing Architects Summer Lab Porto 2024

A transdisciplinary exploration, DA Summer Lab CONSTANT BECOMING will take the participants to a personal journey of architectural choreography, exploring the way we perceive, engage, articulate and create space by moving. It is an invitation to open up a fresh perspective through choreographic investigations, and relate anew to the world around us. And perhaps question what makes us move; start asking new questions about the construct of the city, architecture and the life that contains. All through our thinking body and moving mind because the world is ever changing and never static.

This summer, Dancing Architects would like to think deeper into the idea of “becoming” as a process of constant renewing. All what exist are transitioning from one state to another in continuous flows of changing relationships, both internally and externally of ourselves. We will dive into this dynamic architectural conversations and fleeting relationalities in the city of Porto, a terrain of the oblique. By translating our spatial engagement and felt senses into movement vocabularies, DA24 will culminate in a collective performance as a tapestry of experimental architectural dialogue that will re-evaluate the role of the body in architecture and its design process.

We are excited to partner with INSTITUTO for the second time, and newly with Balleteatro; both leading figures in cultural scenes in Porto. Urban streets and public spaces rich with cultural and culinary delight will also be our playgrounds. Invigorating movement sessions will awaken our spatial awareness, while playful activities will experiment with architectural ideas. An opportunity to work at a community project site will inspire various choreographic objects with which to articulate the quality and the potential of the place. A day of excursion will engage with wonderful architectures that Porto has to offer, including Alvaro Siza’s tidal pool that will surely inspire us to move. With individual inner motivations and senses, participants will learn to express embodied ideas through the physicality of the body and choreography. DA Summer Lab hopes that the participants encounter and challenge something unfamiliar or even strange. Because it is these moments of fresh encounters when our creative intuition works at its best and discover something of lasting importance. Choreography as an agency for architecture also encourages something a little autobiographic that reflects who we are through moving, and moving together towards creating collective experience, and towards our collective future.

Expect the infectious happiness of moving together! Join DA founder Takako Hasegawa (PhD candidate at AA School of Architecture) and dancer Julie Anne Stanzak (Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) this September.

Meet & greet: Sunday, September 1, 6pm
All day workshops: Monday, September 2–Tuesday, September 9
Architecture visits (optional): Tuesday, September 10

Open to all for those who work and study in architecture and spatial practice, arts and cultural practice in wider context. No prior experience in dance and choreography necessary, only your curious self!

For more information, visit Dancing Architects Website.

About Dancing Architects
Approaching architecture through choreography and as choreography, transdisciplinary research platform Dancing Architects cross-pollinate architecture with contemporary dance investigating how choreographic thinking and its creative process can inspire and provoke architecture in its making and experience. By activating architectural ideas through the physicality of our bodies, DA’s inquiries seek for alternative dialogues by placing the architectural experience at the core.

DA’s activities engage with movement as an agency and medium for architecture through the lens of embodied and intangible choreographies that make up the world. It invites transformative shifts in our perception while enabling us to naturally engage with human senses and emotions as values. Moving together also let us learn to trust oneself and one another with a deep sense of sharing and togetherness that contribute to our collective future. By allowing not knowing where this journey might take us to, we arrive at unexpected and enriching.