The Encounter Intensive

Kimberly Bartosik and Burr Johnson

“Who do I want to speak to? Who do I want to speak with?” These were the questions pushing against my conscience in summer 2021 as I slowly emerged from the isolation and loss due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time I was not certain I wanted to return to mychoreographic practice, and if I did, I knew I couldn’t just “go back”. As an artist invested in using my work to critically, tenderly, and violently etch away at deeply distressing threads of our society, I wanted to understand how the wildly changed world would and should inform my practice. My response has been the creation of a multi-project work, The Encounter, comprising a series of locally-cast, live performance projects being created with communities around the world merging professional, pre-professional, and non-professional performers.

In The Encounter workshop as part of “Making Work,” co-led with NYC Encounter performer Burr Johnson, we will start with the questions that drove me in 2021. Each participant will be asked to reflect on how they want their creative practice to illuminate why and how they make work. Topics driving our research will include: How can we redefine virtuosity when inviting untrained or otherly trained participants into our work? What happens if we offer the same prompt to a 70 year old vs a 10 year old? What do we learn about our craft when welcoming other bodies, abilities, histories into it? And finally, how do we keep rigor, artistic excellence, and deep research at the forefront of our practice even when stepping outside the boundaries of our industry-validated circles? How do we meet people where they are while still moving forward?

Practicing on and with each other – as well as people outside the class – each workshop participant will develop a personally devised series of exercises and tools with which they will seed their own project to be shared at the workshop’s end. These can take a multitude of forms: from live performance to video dialogues to experiments in audience participation. Regardless of the form, we will set aside pre-conceived notions of who should be “on stage” and value a broader chorus of voices, more reflective of our world, which feels absolutely relevant and urgent at this time.

To learn more about The Encounter performance projects, please visit: https://www.daela.org/the-encounter