AMORPHOUS

Videos:

Luiz Lopes is an actor and dancer who studied fine arts and acting. Have worked for many years with Antunes Filho in São Paulo(https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antunes_Filho), co-created the performance Macaquinhos (https://www.brusselslife.be/en/event/macaquinhos-kunstenfestivaldesarts-1) and worked for years with Marcelo Evelin (https://www.mousonturm.de/biographies/marcelo-evelin-demolition-inc-nucleo-do-dirceu/). Based in Berlin, now he develops a dance research where all our limitations build and strengths the forms we create. He offers workshops on body awareness, how to deal with exposure and coachs artists during creative processes.

luizfernandeslopes@outlook.com

AMORPHOUS MANIFEST
(workshop and dance class)


DANCE AS A TOOL TO REACH HIDDEN FORSES INSIDE OF US. THINGS WE DENY, HIDE AND YET WE ARE THEM. WHAT EVER CAUSES US SHAME OR DISCONFORT THAT’S WHERE WE WILL TRY TO GO. Can we build a choreography with forms that come from these places? Inspired by these ill fitting sensations?
Instead of a arbitrary, incidental choices?
Instead of a arbitrary, incidental, desired, appreciated form, can we show a unpleasant ugly state? Who judges our formal choices when we build a choreography? Which values are we perpetuating when we choose something pleasant, comfortable, beautiful to show? Receiving the unpleasant, the unknown allows us to feel and see ourselves on a broader way, perspectives we have been ignoring, imposed moral values we had to swallow.
Wouldn’t IT BE MORE REVEALING IF THE FORM SURPRISES INSTEAD OF CONFIRMS our believes?
AMORPHOUS IS A EXPERIENCE OF EXPOSURE, OF ALLOWENSE. AMORPHOUS DOES’T SEEK A FORM BUT A Neglected STATE. SOMETHING IMPORTANT, RELEVANT FOR US but yet avoided or shameful.


In this workshop we are going to find a deep connection with our bodies, through special exercises we will get closer to this living entity that we call ‘our body’. There is more information and real knowledge in our breath, posture, rhythm than we suspect. Millions of years of inherited memory. We will listen to this embodied, biologic knowledge. We will open a channel where exposure does not mean Shame but instead a source of material. This ancestral biological memories which are our bodies.


Avoiding comfortable zones implies touching uncomfortable places.
To hide is always easier than to show your self. To be ok with our limitations, to respect our fears means not to hide them and to find in the exposure of them a sacred time of revelation. Sacred because we will see ourselves without the social mask.


When we learn that its ok to be who we are and that self respect implies to love also your limitations, your fears, your fragilities we realize that our weaknesses also deserve respect, even admiration.

Through the exposure of our fragilities, by the laying bare of one’s own intimacy (bottom line: showing the things we usually hide) we can touch a special place, a place where we are fully present, a place where we can see new potential and follow what has been awakened. Something you didn’t choose and that has been silenced, things that are unbearable to look at but that desperately need our attention.



Allow your self to feel whatever you are feeling, you do not choose what is inside of you, you receive what’s already there. Give it a form. Allow what’s already there to become something, bring it to the out side, expose it. It doesn’t matter if its scary, ugly, strange, weak, fragile, vulnerable, humble, loud, doesn’t matter. This is a bare laboratory, an appropriate area for investigation.



Inner impulses and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. We see only a series of visible impulses.

The requisite state of mind is a passive readiness to realize an active role, a state on which one does not ‘want to do that’ but rather ‘resigns from not doing it’.
The form of common ‘natural’ behavior obscure the truth.
At a moment of psychic shock, a moment of terror, of mortal danger or tremendous joy people do not behave ‘normally’ so lets forget about being normal and receive this awkward forms, lets investigate our interiority.
Performance as an act of transgression, allowing you to be beyond your understanding, in a poor manner, using only our bodies and craft.


Lets try to cross frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness, full feel our selves. A process in which what is dark in us, slowly becomes transparent. In this struggle with one’s own truth, this effort to peel off the life mask, our bodies, with its full fleshed perceptivity must be a place of provocation. Violating accepted stereotypes of vision, feeling and judgment.
Breath, body, inner impulses are our material.
This transgression provides the shock which rips off the mask, enabling us to give our selves nakedly to something that is impossible to define. A need to confront my self with my anguish, obeying a temptation.
Through fright and a sense of the sacred we can create an experiment profaning, transcending our limitations and finding new roads.
When believe is more than mere intellectual conviction.
While retaining our private experience, we can attempt to incarnate this hidden voices, putting on its ill fitting skin. if we strip our selves and touch an extraordinary intimate layer, exposing it, the life mask cracks and falls away. The exposure carried to outrageous excess returns us to a concrete mythical situation, an experience of common human truth.



Here is the place to review feelings, forces, potentials that society, religion, family, the State or your job told you to hide.

Don’t choose a form, don’t choose a rhythm, don’t choose your shape, don’t choose a feeling, don’t choose a emotion. Just seek the way to your self. Reach inner certainty. Grope the way forward no matter where it leads. Don’t speculate with images from the future, don’t dream with roles you want to be assigned for. All that is futile cause all that is incidental, arbitrary. Your task is to discover your own destiny NOT THE ONE YOU WANT, and live it out wholly and resolutely.
Where this feelings, this desires, this forms your body is finding, this sounds you are making where it will lead you that is of no concern, that is not your affair, you seek a impulse to follow not a place to arrive, not a desired circumstance but a unknown one. We will be an experience on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and our only task is to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within us and receive its form.
There have been martyrs who gladly led them selves be nailed to the cross but even these were no heroes, were not liberated, for even them wanted something that they had become fond of and accustomed to, they had models, they had ideals. But a person who only seeks his destiny has neither models nor ideals, has nothing clear and consoling. Lets go there, where there is nothing clear or consoling, lets go there where believe is more than mere intellectual conviction.

Reconnecting something unknown with something known relieves, reassures, satisfies, and gives in addition, a feeling of power. Along with the unknown is given danger, restlessness, worry. The first instinct points to the elimination of this painful states. We are going to stay with them.
When we want to define what we are, at bottom it is only a matter of wanting to get rid of distressing representations so we avoid certain other potentialities natural in us because it scares us, or because it wouldn’t be appropriate to be like that. Well, in the artistic field we can. We can be inappropriate, we can touch our inappropriate parts without the everyday judgment. Let’s Create new eyes to look at our shameful parts as neglect potentialities, find how they can feed our selves. Where they can shape our movement our breath. This is creativity, invention beyond a new fashion. Be shaped by these shameful forces, don’t choose it, be shaped by it, be shaped by your neglect part.
You are not allowed to choose or desire, you are only allowed to desire your self.

Creativity is far more than a marketing tool, it’s a mythical, sacred force that lives inside all of us and we need it to be healthy.