Divine Ridiculous: Clown and Contact Improvisation

"It's better to dance like a fool than to stand around like an idiot"
Oliver Gaspritz

Often we wish to show ourselves as perfect, beautiful specimens. This is a mistake that shields us from many learnings. Since forever, clowns have helped us deal with this tendency by tickling our funny bones. Clowns remind the holier-than-thou that we are only human after all, and more sacred for it.

In this workshop, we’ll dance with the contrasting energies of clown: Silent pathos, vulnerable presence, mad saint, dumb fool, blasphemer, eccentric, satirist, masked dancer, puppeteer, and so on. We’ll connect in an innocent curious trance.

We'll dance with the shit we all live through - rooted in the totality of our bodies knowing, complete with its unique flaws, wounds, memories, warts, lumps, bumps, it's ego and its broken parts - we will dance in raw, colourful creativity.

We'll dance with permission to gently burlesque everything we usually take as sacred, including ourselves. The clown’s challenge will be to do this without becoming heavy, to take flight, vulnerable and open-hearted inside this mirroring work, to guard carefully an awareness of the whole space and stay in a wickedly kind state of poetic bliss infused with pure love.

In this workshop, taking place in the beautiful Quinta Ten Chi in Sintra, Portugal, we'll play with images and archetypes, and see how these can lead us to new, fertile and unexpected places in our dance. The richness of the clowns inner landscape will be a fertile ground to guide the dancers closer to their inner oracles, places of synchronicity, unlikely meetings, and poetic power.

Building a safe container, we will witness ourselves exploring and playing through games, dance scores, and jams.

FACILITATED BY DANIEL HERNANDEZ

My name is Daniel Hernandez. I am an itinerant mischief-maker exploring the ritual roots of performance. The deeper I have dived into teaching, performing, and living in this rich territory, the more I have seen archaic/ shamanic clown and mask cosmologies become fascinating and colourful routes into individuation: containing a vast treasure-box of rituals, dance, liminal states, grotesque archetypes and clown-lore.

My performances, projects, ceremonies and workshops draw upon a wide variety of related traditions: These include Dance, Clown, Bouffon, Butoh, Contact Improvisation, Tao/Tantra, Vodou, Mask, Psychomagic, Art, Sacred Sexuality and Breathwork.

I am continually researching and developing my practice through trainings, readings, writings, ceremonies, experiments, and mistakes. My first love was music. I don’t claim to be a master of anything.

Divine Ridiculous is a community of magico-artistic explorers, engaged in a praxis which incorporates ritual theatre, trance, artist-as-medium, mask-work, chaos magic and mytho-poetic act. Our work is grounded in the art of Clown, we are seeking the Mythical Trickster, Come and Play!

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