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PETER, audio dance workshop
Dance Workshop
Explore, imagine, move.
A companion series to PETER, dance with... These short audio workshops invite you to explore dance through imagination, movement, and curiosity. A space to rethink what dance can be, anywhere, for anyone.
To contact PETER email peterapeterpeter@gmail.com
Listen to PETER, dance with… RSS feed (https://anchor.fm/s/1112d000c/podcast/rss), Youtube , Spotify , Apple podcasts , Deezer and by searching PETER, dance with wherever you get your podcasts.
S1 Ep1 Dance workshop (What is dance?)
In this first session, we begin with the deceptively simple but endlessly complex question: what is dance?
Through a series of guided exercises, you’ll explore your own felt sense, the bodily awareness that tells you when something feels like dance and when it doesn’t. Starting with the practice of not dancing, you’ll learn to notice where dance emerges in your everyday actions, how it shifts with your attention, and how your personal definitions already shape the way you move.
No experience is required. Whether you’re new to dance or returning after years of practice, this episode invites you to pause, experiment, and reflect on your unique relationship to movement.
By the end, you’ll have started building your own map of dance, one rooted in curiosity, perception, and the knowledge already in your body.
S1 Ep2 Dance workshop (Space and Self)
In this session, we turn our attention to space, the rooms we move in, the pathways we carve, and the invisible boundaries that shape how we dance.
Through guided explorations, you’ll notice how your body relates to positive and negative space, how personal space expands and contracts, and how moving across a room creates paths that carry meaning. You’ll also experiment with proximity, boundaries, and how awareness of the environment, walls, objects, even imagined others, changes your felt sense of dancing.
This episode invites you to deepen your awareness of where you are, how you occupy space, and how space itself becomes a partner in your dancing. By the end, you’ll have new insights into how the environments around you shape your movement, your choices, and your evolving sense of dance.
S1 Ep3 Dance workshop (Stillness as Dance)
In this episode, we explore the role of stillness in dance and how pauses, holds, and subtle micro-movements shape the way we perceive and create movement.
Through guided exercises, you’ll develop a deeper awareness of your body’s natural stillness, experiment with accumulating stillness, and play with the contrast between motion and pause. You’ll also reflect on how stillness interacts with movement, space, and attention, helping you notice nuances in your dancing and expand your creative expression.
With exercises designed for solo practice or paired exploration, this episode highlights how both movement and stillness are essential tools for understanding and shaping your personal dance vocabulary.
S1 Ep4 Dance workshop (Weight and Gravity)
In this session we explore one of the most fundamental forces in dance: gravity. Together we investigate how weight shapes every movement, from the subtle balancing of Steve Paxton’s Small Dances to the dynamic play of falling and catching yourself. You’ll be guided through exercises that invite you to feel your centre of gravity, to yield or resist weight, and to notice how balance is constantly negotiated in the body.
We expand this exploration into movement with the ground, furniture, and even the walls around you, introducing ideas from contact improvisation, release technique, and somatic practices like Body-Mind Centering. You’ll also experiment with the “weight of consciousness,” sensing how holding or remembering weight changes your awareness and your movement possibilities.
By the end, you’ll have a richer felt understanding of how weight supports, challenges, and inspires dance, whether you’re walking, rolling, balancing, or simply standing still.
S1 Ep5 Dance workshop (Balance and Imbalance)
In this session we explore balance as both a physical and conceptual experience, how we find stability and how we lose it. Building from last week’s work on Weight & Gravity, this episode looks at balance as an ever-changing negotiation rather than a fixed position.
You’ll be guided through a series of experiments: finding your own centre of balance, tipping, twisting, and reaching beyond your base of support. We’ll play with different dynamics, stillness and suspension, speed and softness, to notice how balance shifts with every choice we make.
Rather than drawing from established dance techniques, this session invites you to explore your own ways of balancing and destabilising, to ask how risk and control shape your dancing. Is balance a point of safety, or a moment of daring? How do you balance your references, your emotions, your sense of self within dance?
Through this, we continue developing a personal and felt understanding of dance, one that’s grounded, unstable, and alive.
S1 Ep6 Dance workshop (Tempo and Rhythm)
In this session we turn to time: the internal clocks that live in your breath and pulse, and the external cues that shape how we move. You’ll be invited to listen first, to your heartbeat, your breathing, the quiet rhythms already present in your body, then to use that inner tempo as a guide for movement.
We move through simple experiments: syncing movement to breath, exploring snail-slow and lightning-fast tempi, and noticing what kinds of movement each speed invites. Then you’ll make rhythm with your body, claps, stomps, vocal sounds, and feel the difference between sounding a beat and marking it with gesture. After that we bring in outside rhythms: dancing with, against, or ignoring a chosen piece of music, and watching how it changes your choices.
The episode also opens up the idea of polyrythm, multiple rhythms layered through the body, and offers a practical challenge: try moving one body part slow while another moves fast. Finally, there’s a long, free exploration without music, so you can discover how many rhythms may already be living in you and how they shape what you want to make.
By the end you’ll have a clearer sense of whether rhythm is central to your dance, how external structure helps or limits you, and what tempos light up your curiosity. Bring patience, a willingness to sound silly, and a notebook if you like, this one rewards listening and reflection.
S1 Ep7 Dance workshop (Direction and Pathways)
In this session, we turn our attention to where movement goes, to direction, pathway, and the lines our bodies trace through space. What determines where we move? Is it choice, curiosity, gravity, emotion, or something else entirely?
We begin by drawing invisible lines through the air, straight, curved, spiralled, zigzagged, inspired by William Forsythe’s improvisation technologies, where the dancer becomes a kind of draftsman, sketching motion in space. From there, the session shifts toward losing and finding orientation: following impulses, sounds, or sensations that redirect us. We wander and deviate, noticing what happens when direction dissolves into discovery.
The episode then explores the body as compass, guided not by left and right but by north, south, east, and west, a way to reimagine orientation as planetary rather than anatomical. This expands into experiments with momentum and redirection, asking: how can we keep moving without simply continuing? What does it mean to be redirected, by a wall, the floor, another person, without stopping?
Finally, we play with forgetting direction: moving toward something, then letting go of the intention and finding a new path in the same motion. This practice of continuous reorientation invites a softer sense of purpose, where each line and curve becomes an open question.
By the end, the focus widens back to daily life, noticing how direction and pathway shape not only our dancing, but the way we inhabit the world: every trace, curve, and hesitation a kind of personal choreography.
https://improvisation-technologies.zkm.de/lectures/lines/
S1 Ep8 Dance workshop (Size and Scale)
In this session, we explore the scale of movement, from the tiniest gestures inside the body to the expansive reach of the whole universe. Starting with the human body as a reference point, you’ll notice the range and limits of your gestures, the arcs and sweeps you naturally make, and the spaces you inhabit as a mover.
You’ll then be guided through exercises inspired by Glenda Batson and Susan Sentler, exploring the concept of the fold. First, you’ll investigate folds in your environment—fabric, paper, furniture—then shift your attention inward to the folds and creases within your own body. Finally, you’ll play with folding and unfolding yourself, imagining how your movements can expand into the surrounding world or contract into the universe.
The session concludes by inviting you to map your dance across multiple scales: from the particle level to planetary phenomena, from micro-movements to cosmic gestures. By the end, you’ll have developed a heightened awareness of scale, attention, and imagination in your dancing, and new ways to perceive and shape movement in relation to space, self, and the wider world.
S1 Ep9 Dance workshop (Effort and Ease)
This episode focuses on the tone and energy of movement, exploring the dynamic spectrum between effort and ease. You’ll start by sensing where tension, holding, or gripping exists in your body, gradually exaggerating and then releasing it, noticing how attention itself carries effort.
Through free movement, you’ll explore high-effort gestures—pushing, resisting, reaching—contrasted with low-effort, yielding, and softening actions. Imaginative prompts, such as moving through air, water, syrup, or stone, help you feel how effort adapts to different qualities of resistance.
Next, you’ll engage in “repetitive waves”: small repetitive movements that swell to intensity and fade to near nothing, discovering how to sustain, release, and let ease lead. The session culminates in whole-body movement in ease, inviting flow, suspension, and softness with and without music.
Finally, reflection exercises encourage you to map where effort and ease live in your body, sketch or write about your sensations, and consider how this awareness can inform your next movements, daily activities, and ongoing practice. By the end, you’ll have a deeper sensitivity to the tonal qualities of your dancing and a richer sense of how effort and ease interact in motion.
S1 Ep10 Dance workshop (Breath)
In this episode, we return to breath as the basis of movement. I speak about the role breath played in my performance O, and how the score I used there can function as a simple structure for dancing:
grounding, breath, vocal resonance, expansion, and release.
We begin with grounding and noticing the breath without changing anything. From there, we work through a series of vocal and physical expansions inspired by Leah Landau and Lisa Schåman. We follow a progression of sounds — sighs, yawns, small vibrations, and vowel tones (u–o–e–a–m) — noticing how each one creates a different kind of movement or softening. The session also includes panting, laughter, and crying as physical rhythms rather than emotional expressions.
At one point, the group builds toward a short collective scream, simply as a shared peak of breath and sound, before letting everything drop back into quiet. After the scream, we stay with whatever movement remains when we stop “trying” to move.
Throughout the episode the focus stays on breath as the primary mover, allowing the body’s movement to remain secondary or responsive. The session ends with a period of dancing with breath in your own way — in silence or with music — followed by a brief reflection on how breath affected the quality of movement.
S1 Ep11 Dance workshop (Coordination)
In this session we investigate coordination as the practical work of organising different moving elements so they relate rather than collide. We begin simply: choose one or two parts of yourself and explore timing and sequencing — can you make a rhythm or pattern that feels connected rather than disjointed? From there we broaden into multiple-element awareness, noticing and managing several impulses or qualities at once (speed, intensity, flow) and trying the work with and without music. Next we examine independence and interaction — how one movement depends on, supports, or interferes with another, and how these relations change when you bring in space, gravity, breath or imagined constraints. We then extend coordination outwards: match and contrast your movement with the environment, furniture, objects, other people, or music, testing opposition and counterpoint as part of being “coordinated.” Finally, we explore fluidity and adaptability — how patterns arise, how established habits shift, and how transitions are coordinated between different activities. The session closes with a short reflection: what does coordination mean to you after practising it — timing and sequencing, balancing multiple qualities, or something else?
S1 Ep12 Dance Workshop (What is choreography?)
In this session, we shift focus from how we dance to what is being danced. After exploring multiple approaches to improvisation and movement, the workshop turns toward choreography, not as fixed steps to be copied, but as the set of conditions, influences, and structures that inform movement.
The episode begins by questioning a common understanding of choreography as something taught and reproduced. Instead, choreography is approached as that which informs dancing: histories, contexts, people, objects, spaces, moods, language, and attention. Improvisation is examined not as complete freedom, but as something already shaped by these influences. This opens a blurred space where choreographed and improvised practices overlap rather than oppose one another.
From here, the session introduces the idea of choreography as an art form in itself, sometimes referred to as expanded choreography. Rather than asking only how steps are made, the workshop asks what causes dance to take the form it does, and whether those causes might themselves be considered choreographic material. Furniture, clothing, architecture, habits, music, instructions, and social situations are all considered as potential choreographers.
The practical exploration invites participants to dance while paying attention to what is structuring their movement. This includes revisiting earlier exercises, such as trying not to dance and noticing when dance emerges, or deliberately dancing and asking what makes it feel like dance. Participants are encouraged to experiment with music and silence, different spaces, and varying contexts, while observing what informs their movement choices.
The second part of the session focuses on collecting choreographic influences. Participants are invited to gather what choreographs them: movements they’ve learned, music they return to, objects, environments, images, words, or observed behaviours. Reflection is approached through multiple methods including journaling, drawing, recording, watching, copying, and revisiting material, emphasising rehearsal, repetition, and noticing.
The workshop concludes with a reflective practice drawn from Zoë Poluch’s work: a simple instruction to “just dance.” Without analysing or structuring, participants are invited to let go and allow dancing itself to become the reflection on choreography and the questions raised throughout the session.
This episode frames choreography as an ongoing, lived process rather than a finished product, offering tools to notice how dance is continually shaped in everyday life.
Reference:
Ep 29 PETER, dance with Zoë Poluch | [⤓]
DANCE REFLECTIONS 001 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep13 Dance Workshop (Choreography as Set and Setting Steps)
In this session, we focus on choreography in its most familiar sense: choreography as set material, as steps that can be repeated, remembered, ordered, and followed. Building on the previous episode’s exploration of what choreography is and where it comes from, this workshop turns toward how choreography is made concrete through steps, phrases, and sequences.
The workshop begins with a sustained repetition of a single, simple movement. By repeating one step for an extended duration, attention is drawn to how a movement is initiated, what elements of it are essential, and how repetition relies on memory, sensation, and bodily awareness. This exercise foregrounds the labour of precision and the difficulty of doing “the same thing” again and again.
From there, the session opens into improvisation, inviting participants to notice when steps begin to emerge from free movement. Rather than deciding steps in advance, the focus is on recognising how movements become identifiable, repeatable, and potentially part of a sequence.
The workshop then shifts toward consciously setting choreography. Participants create a short sequence of steps and observe how they remember, order, and connect movements. Attention is given to decision-making around transitions, timing, spacing, and orientation, as well as the different tools that can support memorisation and composition, such as writing, counting, recording, or visual reference.
Finally, the session addresses choreography as something that can exist outside oneself, by copying and following an external source such as a video or written description. This brings questions of authority, accuracy, control, and interpretation into focus, asking where choreography actually resides when steps are set and followed.
The session closes with a reflective task that turns away from strict execution and toward description. By describing movement qualities in words, participants are invited to consider how language itself can influence, prompt, and shape dancing, without fixing it into a rigid form.
Reference:
Ep15 PETER, dance with Linda Wardal | [⤓]
DANCE REFLECTIONS 003 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep14 Dance Workshop (Movement or experience as Material / Scores)
In this session, the focus shifts from choreography as set steps toward movement and experience as material. Building on the previous episode’s exploration of set choreography, the workshop opens choreography back up again, asking what happens when movement is treated less as a fixed product and more as something that can be shaped, altered, abstracted, and reworked.
The session begins by proposing movement as something similar to clay: a material that can be molded, refined, reduced, layered, and reshaped over time. Participants are invited to take a movement and work on it incrementally, making small changes, extracting parts, adding texture, tone, or emphasis, and viewing the movement from multiple angles. This process can be done directly through the body or through external materials such as clay, drawing, writing, video, or images, continually returning to the experience of movement itself.
Alongside this, the workshop addresses the complications of treating the body as material. Attention is given to how choreographing on oneself can lead to over-identification with image, self-presentation, and visibility. By working with movement as material among other materials, the practice offers a way to distance choreography from personal identity, allowing movement to be handled, tested, and changed without needing to fully represent the self.
The session then introduces choreography as score. Rather than choreography only meaning set steps, it is framed as a system of instructions or written directions that inform movement. Participants are invited to write scores ranging from highly detailed to extremely minimal, noticing how different forms of instruction affect autonomy, intention, memory, and interpretation. The relationship between scoring and improvisation is acknowledged as fluid, with scores functioning both as compositional tools and as prompts for exploration.
Toward the end of the workshop, attention turns to what else might be considered material: not only movements or instructions, but also the transitions, gaps, and relationships between elements. From here, participants are invited to work with what is most readily available in their experience, allowing ease, accessibility, and external materials to lead the dance. Objects, environments, or simple external cues are used to guide movement, shifting choreography away from control and toward acceptance of what emerges.
The session closes with a reflective assignment that moves outside the studio, encouraging participants to articulate their dancing through conversation, using language as another way of shaping and understanding choreographic material.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 004 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep15 Dance Workshop (Habits)
In this episode, we turn our attention to habits and their complex role in dancing and choreography. Drawing on Jonathan Burrows’ questions “Are you doing what you want to do, or are you following your habits?” and “What if following your habits is the right thing to do?”, the session approaches habits not as something to simply overcome, but as embodied knowledge formed through repetition, practice, and skill.
The episode begins by unpacking what habits are: repeated actions that have become unconscious, allowing movement to happen without constant decision-making. Habits make dancing possible, yet they are also often what dancers attempt to disrupt in order to find new ways of moving. Rather than treating habits as a problem, this workshop holds them in a more neutral space, asking what they give us, what they limit, and whether it is ever truly possible to move outside them.
A guided improvisation follows, led continuously through voice and music. You are invited to move, sit, lie down, or walk, wherever you are, while listening to a series of spoken prompts inspired by Deborah Hay–like questioning. The guidance encourages you to notice initiation, effort, attention, stillness, ease, difficulty, and choice, and to explore what happens when habits are neither corrected nor avoided, but observed as information. The voice acts as a score, gently disrupting habitual decision-making and shifting focus away from self-judgement or performance.
After this shared improvisation, you are invited to explore the opposite approach: deliberately following your habits. In this short solo investigation, the task is to dance only what feels habitual and familiar, and to notice whether creativity, difference, or accident still appear. This raises questions about repetition, awareness, and whether habits can ever be fully known or isolated.
The episode closes with a reflective assignment focused on practice and repetition. You are invited to journal, map, or schedule your dancing habits, noticing how practices form over time and how they choreograph the body. This reflection can be observational or intentional, structured or loose, offering a way to consider how habits shape both daily life and long-term dancing practices.
This session sits between acceptance and resistance, asking not how to escape habits, but how to dance with them.
Music mason by mobygratis
DANCE REFLECTIONS 006 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep16 Dance Workshop (Stages, Performance, and Audience)
In this workshop, we use the idea of the stage as a way to think about how dance appears, how it becomes present, and how it is witnessed. Rather than treating the stage only as a traditional theatre space, the episode expands the notion of staging to include solo practice, social dance, public space, teaching situations, media, and everyday contexts.
The session explores how different stages produce different kinds of performativity, attention, and choreography. Who is watching? How is the dance being witnessed? What codes are at play? Through a series of invitations, listeners are encouraged to experiment with staging their dance alone, with others, for known and unknown audiences, in private and public settings, and through non-bodily media such as sound, scores, and images.
The workshop proposes staging as an active choreographic material, something that shapes how dance is understood, felt, and practiced, and invites dancers to explore how audience, context, codes, and framing continuously choreograph the dance itself.
Types of Stages Mentioned
- Solo and Personal Stages
- Dancing alone for oneself
- Self-witnessing through sensation, memory, or bodily experience
- Dancing alone while recording video
- Private outdoor spaces where one feels “alone enough”
- Practice as a staged situation
- Relational and Social Stages
- Dancing with one other person
- Social dance and folk dance
- Dancing simultaneously with and for others
- Club or discotheque dance floors
- Participation-based stages
- Educational and Workshop Stages
- Dance studios
- Classroom stages
- Teacher-led staging
- Improvised classroom configurations
- Demonstration, copying, and mimicry
- Traditional Performance Stages
- Theatre stages
- Proscenium and elevated stages
- Ballet and musical theatre stages
- Frontal audience seating
- Codified theatre conventions
- Public and Street Stages
- Street performance
- Shopping centres
- Public squares
- Informal audience gathering through action
- Performances without explicit audience consent
- Disruption of public-space codes
- Contextual and Codified Stages
- Stages produced through social codes
- Historical theatre conventions
- Shakespearean interactive audiences
- Silent, observing audiences
- Judgment deferred until the end
- Participatory and Invitational Stages
- Social invitations to dance
- Instruction-based participation
- Guided movement situations
- Teaching as staging
- Material and Object-Based Stages
- Dancing on grass
- Dance studio floors
- Dancing with objects (fabric, parachutes, umbrellas, sticks, canes, hats)
- Furniture as stage (chairs, tables, beds)
- Playgrounds
- Mobile and Guided Stages
- Guided tours as choreography
- Walking audiences through spaces
- Sequential staging across locations
- Media and Representational Stages
- Film
- Video
- Sound and music
- Audio formats
- Text/Scores as stages
- Written instructions
- Pictorial and visual forms
- Clay and material artefacts
- Perceptual and Imagined Stages
- Empathetic and kinesthetic witnessing
- Watching as learning
- Neural and sensory staging
- Audience imagination as stage
DANCE REFLECTIONS 007 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep17 Dance Workshop (Instruction, Authority, and Following)
This workshop focuses on instruction and authority as core choreographic materials. Rather than treating authority as something held by a single person or role, the episode explores how authority emerges, shifts, leaks, and is negotiated through instruction, sensation, memory, time, and context.
Through a performative score titled Stand, listeners are invited to experience how even the simplest instruction is never neutral, how it organises bodies, perceptions, histories, and values. Standing becomes a site for questioning obedience, resistance, consent, politics, care, and inheritance, asking who taught us how to stand, for whom, and why.
The workshop then moves through a series of practices: following instructions while internally disagreeing, leading through vague or contradictory instructions, delaying obedience to observe how memory and desire reshape what is followed, and finally working with multiple authorities at once, instruction, sensation, and memory.
Throughout, the session asks what causes our dancing, how we negotiate internal and external authority, and what it might mean to choreograph with multiple authorities rather than choosing one. Instruction is approached not as control, but as a space of ambiguity, creativity, and care.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 009 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep18 Dance Workshop (Copying, Interpretation, and Misunderstanding)
This workshop explores copying as a choreographic practice, focusing on interpretation, accuracy, deviation, and misunderstanding. Rather than treating copying as uncreative or secondary, the episode examines how copying produces difference, imagination, and movement through what is lost, exaggerated, remembered, or transformed.
The session begins by inviting listeners to copy something as accurately as possible, before shifting toward copying badly on purpose by prioritising a single aspect such as timing, effort, or direction. These contrasting approaches open questions around what is valued, ignored, or permitted when we copy movement.
From there, the workshop explores copying from memory, noticing what disappears, what becomes distorted, and what remains as residue. Attention is given to how memory shapes interpretation and how distance in time alters what is reproduced. The session then moves into copying across mediums, translating movement into words, drawing, sound, or other forms, and then back into movement, foregrounding translation as a choreographic tool.
The episode proposes copying as an ongoing chain of reformulations, a practice of moving movement through different bodies, mediums, and interpretations. Through this, the workshop asks where copying ends and interpretation begins, whether accuracy ever truly matters, and how misunderstanding might be a productive and creative force within dancing and choreography.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 010 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep19 Dance Workshop (Consent, Invitation, and Participation)
This workshop explores consent and invitation as ongoing choreographic processes rather than fixed permissions. The episode asks when participation begins, how it is negotiated, and how dancing emerges through subtle, often invisible invitations.
The session begins by attending to unspoken invitations to dance. Listeners are invited to notice when alignment, attention, watching, or responding begins without explicit requests, and to observe where the lines of consent feel active or withdrawn. These explorations can be taken into different contexts, including spaces where dance is expected, unexpected, or usually discouraged, noticing how context shapes what kinds of movement feel possible.
The workshop then introduces conditional participation, using self-imposed rules such as moving only when someone else moves, stopping only when another stops, or responding to attention, absence, or perceived invitation. These conditions foreground consent as relational and contingent, shaped by others and by the environment.
From there, the session explores performativity by creating consent for dance to exist and then deliberately withdrawing it. This practice examines what remains active when permission is removed, how space is produced through restraint or silence, and how the edges of dance continue to operate even when movement pauses.
The episode closes by turning attention inward, inviting listeners to notice when they allow themselves to dance. Reflection focuses on moments of inclusion and exclusion, asking who decides when one is inside or outside the dance, how invitations are internalised, and how different choreographic situations might allow for multiple forms of participation, refusal, and care.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 012 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep20 Dance Workshop (Care, Safety, and Risk)
This workshop explores care, safety, and risk as choreographic conditions that shape how dance becomes possible. Rather than treating safety as a fixed set of rules, the episode considers care as an ongoing responsibility that is continuously negotiated within physical, emotional, and social contexts.
The session begins by reflecting on how the word dance itself creates invitations and expectations, and how different dance spaces specify what kinds of movement are allowed, valued, or considered safe. From this starting point, the workshop asks how care operates when dance appears outside formal stages and studios, and how responsibility is cultivated both alone and with others.
Listeners are invited to map the edges of their dancing by moving toward, but not crossing, their physical, emotional, and attentional limits. This practice focuses on noticing where risk, safety, and care begin to show their necessity, and how these boundaries shift depending on context and condition.
The workshop then introduces a central question: are you caring for the dance, or for the dancer? Through movement, participants explore what the dance might need in a given moment, less intensity, more time, a pause, or an ending, and how choreography might change in response to the dancer rather than asking the dancer to conform to a fixed form.
Further explorations examine the relationship between safety and unsafety, including the desire for risk in dancing and performance. The episode asks how unsafe sensations can be explored without physical harm, and what kinds of meaning, power, or resonance emerge from navigating this tension.
The session closes by considering care as an ethical and choreographic decision, including the choice to stop early, reduce duration, or actively seek the least risky form of dancing. Listeners are invited to reflect on what a dance of care might be, one that includes risk without ignoring it, and how safety, consent, authority, and interpretation continue to shape the conditions in which dance is practiced.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 013 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep21 Dance Workshop (Research as Dancing, Dancing as Research)
In this episode, we turn explicitly to research and recognise that we have, in fact, been researching all along.
The workshop explores multiple ways research operates within dance practice: researching by watching dance in performances, studios, streets, screens, and archives; researching through taking classes and experiencing different aesthetics, techniques, and pedagogical approaches; researching through movement research, understood as open exploration through doing, often overlapping with improvisation; and researching for creation, where texts, images, stories, politics, and contexts become material for choreographic work.
From there, the episode introduces artistic research as a distinct but still-emerging field. Artistic research is framed as a way of thinking through making, where practice is not an illustration of knowledge but a method of producing it. The artwork, process, and reflection form a single field of inquiry, and questions are asked not only with words, but through bodies, materials, time, and attention. What is discovered may remain situated, embodied, sensorial, and resistant to generalisation. The episode briefly situates artistic research historically, noting its relatively recent institutional emergence through PhD programmes in the arts in the 1990s.
The episode then unfolds through three open assignments:
- Research a dance aesthetic or style
Investigate a specific aesthetic through watching, reading, taking classes, or speaking with practitioners. Consider its history, imagery, context, and social or political conditions, then use this research as a starting point to create a dance. The outcome may be set or improvised, brief or extended, and should reflect on how different research methods shape the resulting choreography. - Research anatomy and bodily function
Drawing on concerns of care, safety, and risk, this task focuses on researching a specific anatomical function or bodily system. Using critical sources from dance science, anatomy, and movement research, develop a warm-up, cool-down, improvisation, score, or choreography grounded in functional and safe practice. The episode reflects on how ideas of “correct” posture and healthy movement are historically, culturally, and scientifically unstable. - Research a non-dance topic
Investigate a theme, person, story, place, image, or social situation not directly related to dance, such as people-watching, a character from a film, or a personal obsession. Use this research as material to generate a dance, allowing non-dance knowledge to shape movement qualities, structures, and staging.
The episode concludes by returning to research as an ongoing attitude rather than a fixed method. It reflects on autonomy, intuition, and criticality, arguing that intuition and research are not opposites. Research can also mean looking back at what we intuitively do, documenting it, analysing it, and learning from it. Artistic research is framed as an epistemic critique, challenging what counts as knowledge, who is allowed to produce it, and which forms of knowing are valued, including embodied, affective, collective, and non-verbal knowledge.
Rather than closing questions down, research is presented as a way of deepening complexity, increasing agency, and expanding the field of what dance can know and do.
Keep dancing. Keep researching. Reflect on how research shapes your practice.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 014 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep22 Dance Workshop (What Is Improvisation?)
In this episode, the workshop turns directly toward the question what is improvisation? building on earlier explorations of movement research, consent, authority, and care. Improvisation is approached not as a stylistic outcome or a demand to be spontaneous, but as a method, a way of working, thinking, and deciding through movement in real time.
The episode frames improvisation as a practice of attention and responsibility. Rather than being free from structure, improvisation is revealed as something that always follows something: a rule, a habit, a sensation, a memory, a sound, an environment, or an internalised idea of how movement should look. In this sense, improvisation is not the absence of choreography, but choreography happening in the moment, where authority is distributed and constantly negotiated.
Through a series of guided explorations, listeners are invited first to improvise freely and notice what they are actually following. This is followed by a reflective pause, using writing as a way to articulate the often-unseen forces shaping improvisation. From there, the workshop narrows the focus, asking participants to deliberately follow one identified influence and observe how choice, memory, mood, attention, distraction, and environment continue to intervene.
The episode proposes several ways of thinking improvisation: as decision-making in time, as attention before expression, as composition without rehearsal but not without structure, as play with consequences, and as response rather than originality. Rather than settling on a single definition, the workshop encourages each listener to formulate their own understanding of improvisation, including its difficulties, fears, pleasures, and limits.
Episode 22 positions improvisation as a form of dancing that is ethical, relational, and deeply choreographic, inviting listeners to reflect on how improvisation operates not only in open-ended movement, but also within set choreography, performance, and everyday dancing practice.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 015 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep23 Dance Workshop (Yes to Everything)
This episode continues the exploration of improvisation by focusing on acceptance, momentum, and the compositional power of saying yes. Drawing inspiration from theatre improvisation and the principle of “yes, and”, the workshop treats improvisation as an ongoing practice of agreement, where impulses are not rejected but allowed to enter the dance.
Listeners are invited to work with continuous acceptance: moving by saying yes to every impulse that arises. Refusal is reframed as delay rather than rejection, creating space for momentum without force. The episode begins with an improvisation that follows every impulse safely and attentively, asking what a bodily yes feels like and how it changes the flow of movement.
From there, the focus shifts toward acceptance without correction. Participants are asked to keep moving without refining, improving, or adjusting what appears. Doubt, judgement, and the desire to “fix” movement are noticed but not acted upon. This opens a space where habits of control soften and unexpected qualities can emerge.
The workshop then deepens into wrongness as material. Rather than correcting what feels incorrect, dancers are invited to fully include it, allowing awkwardness, imbalance, or uncertainty to become the dance itself. The episode treats wrongness not as failure, but as a generative choreographic force that can reveal new pathways and sensitivities.
The session closes with reflection, asking when and why a no appeared, what grew from staying with discomfort, and how yes is experienced in the body. When does yes become exhausting? Can hesitation also be a yes? Through movement, writing, or discussion, the episode invites listeners to consider acceptance as both a compositional tool and an ethical practice within improvisation.
Episode 23 frames improvisation as a sustained practice of allowance, where agreement, delay, fatigue, and resistance all become active materials for dancing and thinking in motion.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 016 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep24 Dance Workshop (Improvisation Needs Limits)
In this episode, we move from broad acceptance into something more specific: limits. While improvisation is often framed as total freedom, this session explores how clear, strict rules can actually make dancing feel more possible, playful, and rich.
The episode introduces three simple but demanding improvisation prompts. First, dance while only turning left, noticing how a seemingly obvious rule quickly becomes blurry, unstable, and full of questions. What does “turning left” really mean, and where does it begin or end in the body and the space?
The second prompt asks you to never repeat a movement. This near-impossible task highlights how improvisation often thrives on attempting the unachievable, and what happens when we meet failure, repetition, self-policing, or ease while dancing alone with a rule.
The third prompt restricts movement to the exhale only, shifting attention to breath, timing, and how the rule shapes rhythm and decision-making.
Alongside the dancing, the episode reflects on whether rules restrict or generate movement, when rules disappear during improvisation, and who enforces them once they’re forgotten. The session closes with an open assignment: create one rule for the body and one rule for the space, and improvise until those rules contradict each other.
This episode continues an exploration of autonomy, freedom, and creativity within constraint, asking how limits can become sites of play rather than control.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 018 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep25 Dance Workshop (Call and Response)
This episode stays with improvisation and turns attention toward call and response, answering movement with movement. Rather than imagining improvisation as something that happens in isolation, the session proposes that dancing is always in relationship: to gravity, to the floor, to sound, to space, and to the presence or potential presence of others.
The episode explores different ways of responding. You might copy a movement, counter it, ignore it, or add to it. Copying is framed not as repetition but as response, since no movement is ever truly the same. Ignoring is also treated as a meaningful response, one that creates tension and awareness through distance rather than alignment.
A series of practical approaches are offered. You are invited to respond to music, to silence, and to the ambient sounds of the room, using rhythm, breath, and pulse as calls to move with, against, or alongside. Another prompt asks you to create a movement and then respond to it as if it were made by someone else, allowing pause and stillness to sharpen the identity of each response.
For those working with others, the episode suggests working in pairs or groups, responding to multiple bodies and movements. For those working alone, attention is placed on imagination, timing, and the use of pause as an active part of call and response.
The episode closes with an assignment: record a short improvisation, return to it after a few days, and improvise a response to the recording. This opens questions about what it means to answer rather than continue, when response becomes imitation, and whether a response can disagree.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 019 with Peter and Yari
Dance Workshop Special Ep with Benjamin Pohlig (How Do Anarchists Dance?)
This is a special dance workshop episode with guest Benjamin Pohlig. After many years researching together dance and politics, Peter and Benni give this workshop after a focused research on “how anarchists dance” with the support of MARC (Milvus Artistic Research Center) and DansiT Koreografisk senter / Choreographic Center.
In the workshop they stay with the main question: how do anarchists dance? This leads to other questions. What is anarchy? What is dance? and can movement happen without a leader or fixed plan?
The episode works with simple prompts. What happens if you move and call it anarchy? Hide the dancing anarchist from domination. Find affinities hidden from domination.
This is a practical session, cancels dance in the face of domination. It does not try to give a clear answer, but to let you test the question through movement.
- How does an anarchist dance?
- What is anarchy?
- What is dance?
DANCE REFLECTIONS 019 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep26 Dance Workshop (The One-Minute Dance)
This episode focuses on time as one of the largest compositional structures in improvisation. Until now, much of the responsibility for timing has been left open, but here timing becomes the frame itself. The session asks a simple but demanding question: when does an improvisation begin, and when does it end?
The core task is to create a dance that lasts exactly one minute. You are invited to begin immediately when the timer starts and to end without preparing an ending. By working within an extremely short temporal frame, the episode explores how duration shapes decision-making, attention, and narrative. A one-minute dance refuses the long arc of endurance and instead sharpens urgency, clarity, and choice.
The task is then repeated multiple times. You are asked to perform the one-minute improvisation at least three times, noticing what remains consistent and what changes from iteration to iteration. Through repetition, patterns begin to appear and questions of composition start to surface, even within improvisation.
The episode reflects on temporal framing more broadly, including counting, pauses, and measured durations as tools for structuring movement. Time is treated as an active material rather than a neutral container.
A reference is made to Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, where participants hold simple actions for exactly one minute, temporarily becoming a sculpture before it disappears. This connection situates the exercise within a wider artistic context.
The episode closes with three reflective questions:
- How does time change your decisions?
- What gets prioritised when time is scarce?
- When does improvisation start to feel composed?
DANCE REFLECTIONS 022 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep27 Dance Workshop (Blindfold Dance – Sensory Hierarchies)
This episode continues the exploration of improvisation by shifting attention to sensory hierarchy. Rather than adding more material, the practice works by removing or limiting one sense in order to notice how movement reorganises itself.
The primary invitation is to reduce or remove vision. This can be done by closing the eyes, dimming the room, using a blindfold, or practising a “reverse blink”, where the eyes remain closed and briefly open from time to time, offering momentary snapshots of the space. With vision limited, movement is guided instead by balance, sound, touch, and whatever senses remain available once sight is reduced.
After the first improvisation, the episode pauses for reflection. You are invited to write down three things that surprised you while dancing without vision. Reflection is treated as a structural part of improvisation, not something separate from dancing. The act of noticing and articulating experience feeds back into the next movement.
The improvisation is then repeated, allowing the written reflections to inform the second dance. Attention is given to how perception shifts once awareness has been named.
The episode closes with reflective questions:
- What replaces vision when it is removed?
- Does the body move differently when it is unseen?
- Who are you dancing for when sight is gone?
These questions open onto issues of perception, performativity, and self-witnessing, and how improvisation changes when visual orientation is no longer dominant.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 024 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep28 Dance Workshop (Interruptions and Disruptions – Breaking Patterns)
This episode focuses on interruption as an improvisational practice, using disturbance as a way to reveal how patterns form, persist, and resist change.
The main improvisation begins with free dancing. As soon as a recognisable pattern appears, it is interrupted immediately. When something becomes familiar, named, or recognisable, the task is to do something else. The aim is not to avoid movement, but to disrupt recognition itself and see whether it is possible to become lost within the dance.
Attention is placed on how quickly patterns form and how recognition shapes decision-making. Rather than trying to eliminate patterns completely, the practice acknowledges the impossibility of fully escaping them. Choreography, habit, and pattern are understood as deeply entangled.
In the second task, you are invited to identify one pattern or habit that resisted interruption. Instead of breaking it, this recurring pattern becomes the centre of a new improvisation. You are encouraged to set a clear duration and build a dance around what could not be disrupted.
The episode closes with reflections on interruption and resistance:
- How quickly do patterns form?
- Is interruption violent, playful, or both?
- What resists being broken, and how?
- How are patterns made, recognised, and sustained?
- What is the difference between habit and pattern, if there is one?
This episode frames improvisation as a creative play with limitation, repetition, and disruption, where choreography emerges through the tension between recognition and refusal.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 025 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep29 Dance Workshop ( Movement Mash-Up – Layering Scores and Memory)
This episode explores layering as an improvisational tool: combining multiple scores, rules, and past experiences into a single dance. Layered scores can make dancing cognitively demanding, asking you to hold several instructions at once. This difficulty is not a problem to solve, but a strategy that helps the body take over when thinking becomes too busy.
The practice begins by mashing together fragments from earlier exercises. You might combine turning left with never repeating a movement, or hold several past prompts simultaneously. There is no fixed order and no planning ahead. The task is simply to improvise while allowing different scores to coexist and interfere with one another.
After dancing, you are invited to pause and reflect. Notice three movements or actions that keep returning during the mash-up. Write them down, draw them, or name them in whatever way feels useful. Then return to the dance and repeat each of these movements intentionally, just once.
The episode closes with questions around memory, repetition, and authorship:
- What returns without being invited?
- How does memory choreograph you?
- Which movements live in the body, and which require conscious recall?
- When does improvisation begin to function as an archive?
This episode treats improvisation as a meeting point between thinking and not thinking, where past dances, tasks, and experiences resurface and reorganise themselves in the present moment.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 027 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep30 Dance Workshop (Invent a Game – Improvisation as World-Building)
This episode treats improvisation as a form of world-building. Rather than starting with fixed instructions, you are invited to invent a game while dancing. Let rules emerge from the movement itself, play them seriously, and at some point break one of them.
The task begins with improvising until a sense of a game appears. This might be something simple, like avoiding certain areas of the floor, responding to imagined dangers, or establishing unspoken agreements with space, timing, or direction. Once the game becomes clear, commit to its rules as if they matter. Then deliberately break one rule and notice what changes.
After dancing, write down the rules you think you were following. Then dance the game again using those written rules and compare the two experiences. What you thought you were doing and what actually happened may not be the same, and that gap becomes part of the research.
The episode closes with questions around play, performance, and agency:
- When does play become dance or performance?
- Who decides when the game ends?
- Is breaking the rule part of the game itself?
This final reflection opens onto a broader idea of improvisation, not as absolute freedom, but as an ongoing awareness of the rules you are already following and the choice, moment by moment, to continue, bend, or refuse them. You are invited to finish by writing a short manifesto on what improvisation means to you.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 028 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep31 Dance Workshop (The Silent Knowledge of the Body)
This workshop explores the often-felt “silence” of dance—its muted, non-verbal quality—and questions why, particularly in Western contexts, dance is so often understood as separate from speech and language.
Together, we will examine how meaning arises in movement: not as something spoken or symbolically defined, but as something sensed, embodied, and relational. Drawing on both historical and contemporary perspectives, we will briefly consider how dance has been positioned as expressive rather than intellectual—shaped by traditions where language carries meaning and movement supports it. In contrast, we will explore dance as a form of knowledge in itself.
Rather than treating movement as expression, this workshop proposes a shift:
What changes if we treat movement as knowledge?
Through guided improvisations, participants will investigate the intelligence of the body—its capacity to act, respond, and organize itself without relying on verbal explanation or narrative intention. We will work with simple, everyday (pedestrian) actions such as sitting, standing, walking, or reaching, observing how the body already knows how to do what it does.
A key practice within the session involves continuously asking:
“Is this it? Is this what I think it is?”
This question invites a mode of witnessing—pausing, adjusting, repeating, and lingering with movement—to sense whether what is happening is being performed, expressed, or simply known.
The workshop will move between:
- Observing the body’s inherent knowledge
- Staying close to everyday, non-stylized movement
- Gently approaching what we might call “dance,” without losing this sense of knowing
Participants will also reflect on:
- The difference between sensation, expression, and knowledge
- Whether the body “knows” before we can think or name
- How language may fix or reduce experience
- Whether expression is something constructed on top of a more immediate bodily intelligence
This is an open, exploratory session. It does not aim to define dance, but to question how it exists and how it is understood.
At its core, the workshop asks:
- Why is dance often felt most strongly when it is silent?
- What kind of meaning emerges without words?
- Can dance be understood not as something that communicates, but as something that simply is?
No prior experience is required—only a willingness to observe, question, and move.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 030 with Peter and Yari
S1 Ep32 Dance Workshop (Dancing with Sound: The Body, Music, and Silent Knowledge)
This workshop continues an exploration into the perceived separation between dance and language, extending the inquiry into another possible divide: the relationship between music and the moving body.
Why do we often experience dance as something separate from sound? And how does music influence what the body already knows?
Building on the idea of the body as a site of knowledge rather than expression, this session investigates how different forms of sound; music, rhythm, and pure tone, interact with and reveal the body’s inherent intelligence.
We begin by observing how the body responds to music. Participants will select a piece of music and witness how their body already knows how to engage with its rhythm, tone, and mood. Rather than trying to interpret or express the music, the focus is on recognizing what is already present; what patterns, movements, and structures emerge without conscious decision.
From here, we expand into an exploration of musical diversity. By working with contrasting genres, participants will examine how different musical traditions shape bodily organization, perception, and movement. This becomes an opportunity to reflect on how cultural, historical, and rhythmic structures are already embedded in the body.
A different music genre everyday for a year:
The workshop then shifts toward a more elemental investigation of sound. Using simple audio phenomena—such as frequency sweeps, resonant tones, decay, and binaural beats—we explore how the body responds to sound beyond music, at the level of vibration and sensation.
Participants will:
- Listen to and move with shifting frequencies, noticing how sound resonates within the body
- Follow the gradual disappearance of sound, attending to decay, silence, and lingering sensation
- Experience internally generated rhythms through binaural listening, observing how perception and the nervous system participate in movement
Throughout, the emphasis remains on witnessing rather than performing:
- How does the body organize itself in relation to sound?
- What forms of knowledge are revealed through listening?
- What happens when we allow sound to act on the body, rather than trying to respond to it?
This workshop does not aim to define a correct way of dancing with music. Instead, it offers a space to explore how sound, whether complex or minimal, can expose the body’s capacity to sense, adapt, and know.
At its core, the session asks:
- Is the relationship between music and dance truly separate, or already intertwined?
- What does the body know about sound before we decide how to move?
- Can listening itself be a form of dancing?
No prior experience is required. Participants are invited to listen, observe, and move with curiosity and care, especially when working with sound through headphones.
DANCE REFLECTIONS 028 with Peter and Yari
Music leaning by mobygratis