BODY WEATHER NAARM

In Waring season according to the Kulin Nations’ calendar, this series of classes will be led alternately by Frank van de Ven and Gretel Taylor, aiming to expand physical range and deepen embodied understandings. Sessions include MB (Mind/Body, Muscle/Bone workout) and/or groundwork exercises introducing sensory tasks, imagery and presence.

Body Weather is a comprehensive approach to training and performance that investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities, but as constantly changing – just like the weather.

The term and philosophical basis for Body Weather was founded in the early 1980s in Japan by dancer Min Tanaka and further developed by proponents worldwide. Body Weather was introduced to Australia by Tess de Quincey in 1989.

New and experienced Body Weather practitioners all welcome.

Gretel Taylor trained at the Body Weather Farm in Japan in 1999 and 2000, which informed her performance, teaching and research (as BodyPlaceProject). She has performed site-responsive works in many odd places, locally and internationally. Gretel developed an improvisational ‘locating’ practice as a mode of relating to place during her PhD (2009) and as an ongoing inquiry, with particular interest in ecological and decolonial lenses on site-based performance. She has taught Dance and Performance at Deakin, RMIT, Monash and Victoria University, as well as regularly at Dancehouse. www.greteltaylor.com

Frank van de Ven was a member of Body Weather founder Min Tanaka’s Maijuku Performance Company in Japan from 1983-1991. With Katerina Bakatsaki he founded Body Weather Amsterdam, a platform for training and performance. He has an ongoing commitment to the Body/Landscape projects conducted worldwide and since 1995 he has led the annual, interdisciplinary Bohemiae Rosa Project (Czech Republic) with Milos Sejn, connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture. bodyweatheramsterdam.nl