No te lo quites!
December 4, 2009
ChoreoComp one day project
Artez School of Dance
Sebastian Morris
December 2, 2009
SEBASTIAN MORRIS
ChoreoComp two day project
Artez School of Dance
Choreography by Juliana Atuesta in collaboration with Raúl Saldarriaga
Tanzlandschaft Kolumbien
November 10, 2009
An evening of colombian coreographies
November 25th and 26th.
Artez School of Dance, Theater 3, 20 hrs.
Performance, ritual and reality
November 10, 2009
Presentation at Rijksmuseum Enschede, November 6th
guardian.co.uk and nytimes.com
November 1, 2009
I just wanted to post how I experienced the performance of The Wheeldon Company in Morphoses. Three audience members (who are not just audience members) write about a piece in the repertoire of a performance:
Songs of Leaving
Judith Mackrell (The Guardian): “Songs of Leaving, by the Australian choreographer Tim Harbour, is leadenly overburdened by intimations of mortality. Couples drag out mournful eye contact; women are hoisted like sexy, reproachful wraiths above their partners’ heads. While Ross Edwards’s score is pleasantly plangent, it seems to encourage Harbour’s derivative tendencies. When he isn’t pushing his themes of death and rebirth too hard, he reveals a much more interesting imagination, however. Setting two duets against each other, for instance, his choreography starts to work its own alchemy, bodies colliding, flying and retreating as if subject to their own laws of physics”.
Gia Kourlas (New York Times): “Next to Leaving Songs, a new work for four women and five men by the Australian choreographer Tim Harbour, “Commedia” is choreographic gold. Mr. Harbour sets “Leaving Songs” to meditative music by Ross Edwards in an effort, as he put it in a film, to show the “full-circle concept of what life and death is.” Dancers carry clear balloons — apparently, the cycle of life is round and full of air — and demonstrate circular shapes with curving torsos and rolls on the floor. Heartfelt to its detriment and packed with clichés, “Leaving Songs” is a deflating, shapeless bore”.
Luke Jennings (The Guardian): “This is apparent in two questionable programming choices. Leaving Songs by the Australian choreographer Tim Harbour is a slender elegy set to music by Ross Edwards, and features bathetic passages in which white balloons are wonderingly lifted aloft. Towards the end, for no obvious reason, the dancers go into a series of extreme undulations as if tortured by constipation; a sequence so queasy it made audience members wince”.
J. What´s smelly in here? Hey, is that my shirt you got on? C. I don´t think so J. Yeah, I think it is, this doesn´t smell like me C. This smells like me too J. But this smells like you C. Because I am me J. Is that my shirt, why are you always copying me? C. I am not copying you J. Why you dont get your own style? C. I´ve my own style J. No, you are always copying me, your style is my style cause you copy it C. It´s my style J. No, it is not your style C. Service´s bad, coffie´s bad, music sucks J. Hey, these are my shoes C.Those are my shoes J. Those are my shoes J. Those are my other shoes C. Bullshit!
(Jim Jarmush, Fragment Coffee and Cigarettes, 2003)
Triptych, September 19th
August 26, 2009
Choreography by: Juliana Atuesta
Dance: Elisa Marschall
Music: Felipe Deckers
Voice: Nienke de la Rive Box
Poems: Jaap Robben (Nijmegen´s city poet)
St. Steven´s Church, Nijemegen
September 4th and 5th
August 26, 2009
The presence of memory
June 25, 2009
Everyday life practices assume the existence of a body articulated within its individual and collective experiences. My interest is founded in envisioning and understanding the body as a territory which is at the same time socially and individually constructed and constructor, passive and active, playing the role of container and agent as well. This conception allows one think of a dynamic body rather than a static one. The first body-“vessel” or container engages with the idea of the body as a receptor, as an entity which carries out the reference of a code; and the second body-“agent” with the idea of projection, as an entity which chooses the way of how to deal with the code. It is in this intersection, between past and future, that I place the concept of memory. Memory operates as a process of repetition, assimilation and re-appropriation within a context which regulates and codifies the body; and at the same time it brings about a destabilization of this context in order to re-consider it. Therefore, memory paradoxically accesses the body itself, unpacking the dilemma of its presence. How does memory articulate itself in an organized context? In short, what forms and performs the instauration of memory in a context that already forms an ensemble?
Coming up: June 26th
June 20, 2009
CUTICULA NERVOSA
An 
individual, a body, a solo. Sounds and skin waiting for language constitute a suffocated palimpsest of enunciations.
Choreography: Juliana Atuesta
Dance: Elisa Marschall
Sound: Xander Driessen
Art Lab: June 26th
Ottho Heldringstraat 3, Amsterdam
Photo: Rose Andrea
Fulfilled and emptied, abrupt and futile, wild and docile,
fugitive and permissive…gestures of memory.
Warm soft and subtle: the body before lovemaking
Fresh, soft and ductile: the flesh of seduction
Mobile and violent and metaphysical: the form of the face
Gentle and weary and subtle: the body after lovemaking
(Jean Baudrillard)
Our everyday life practices are permeated with a non perceptible memory which is incorporated as habit. The habit as memory is present where at first it appears not to be, it is sedimented in the body, acting-out more than remembering. In this sense, habit is being considered as a process of unaware selection of movements, patterns, body behaviors, body practices…, setting down a ’silent’ institution. How does this process occur? How can one physically think this process? How can habit be de-territorialized?
[1] De CERTEAU, “La invención de lo cotidiano” in Pensar en público, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2004
Memory of a happy family
December 20, 2008
Altura y pelos
January 10, 2009
¿Quién no tiene su vestido azul?
¿Quién no almuerza y no toma el tranvía,
con su cigarrillo contratado y su dolor de bolsillo?
¡Yo que tan sólo he nacido!
¡Yo que tan sólo he nacido!
¿Quién no escribe una carta?
¿Quién no habla de un asunto muy importante,
muriendo de costumbre y llorando de oído?
¡Yo que solamente he nacido!
¡Yo que solamente he nacido!
¿Quién no se llama Carlos o cualquier otra cosa?
¿Quién al gato no dice gato gato?
¡Ay, yo que sólo he nacido solamente!
¡Ay, yo que sólo he nacido solamente!
Cesar Vallejo
Quítate de la acera
March 9, 2009
Melodías similares evocan recuerdos
Movimientos perpetuos evocan memorias
Residuos corporales evocan nostalgia y silencios
Deseos cinéticos evocan angustias, castigos, recompensas y catarsis
Krystian Czaplicki
April 2, 2009
Mauerwerke 
Coming up: May 6th
April 13, 2009
QUÍTATE DE LA ACERA
May 6th, Royal Conservatory of Liege
20:00 hours
Music by Leo Brower
Guitarre: Felipe Deckers
Dance and choreography: Juliana Atuesta
Coming up: May 19th and 20th
April 20, 2009
Daily life is permeated by repeated actions which are themselves charged with codes, signs and significations. We learn how to behave, how to read, how to remember; but we also might learn how to forget, how to write without being able to read and how to read without being able to understand. This is a piece where the everyday body plays a duet with the performative one, through habits and actions, language and words, conversation and discussion, oblivion and remembering.
Concept and choreography: Juliana Atuesta
Dancers: Joyce Brussee, Dirk Jeukens, Liat Gabay, Patrick Radu
Music: Cesar Díaz
Light Design: Egbert Mellema
Techical Support: Artez School of Dance
Photo: Diego Contreras
Location: Artez School of Dance Theater 1
Special thanks to: Joao Da Silva, Isabel Cuesta, Santiago Escobar, Lior Benador, Juan Fernando Botero and Carlos Vergara.
