Current Projects (2024-25)

Life’s form(s)

Shonen company’s partners will tour an inclusive dance performance ‘Life’s Form(s)’. Workshops will also be organised for professionals and disabled performers. This support will help build an art and inclusivity network across Europe to develop the field of inclusive art in the long term.

The performance brings together on stage three dancers and performers in loss of mobility (a former dancer and a former professional boxer), shifting the contemporary notion of the ‘augmented body’, in a show combining performance and cinema.

New choreographic patterns, in the field of dance-contact, were specifically designed to allow disabled and non-disabled performers to practise together without any usual prosthesis (‘human prosthesis’, as non-disabled collaborators replace prosthesis).

The collaborations with the partners are based on an open dialogue about how to collaborate at a European level regarding the specificities of each country in terms of organisational skills, implementation of a project with disabled people, cultural mediation, sharing knowledge and experience to build a cooperation about innovation and good practices. The project means to increase awareness in each territory to include disabled people as professionals in performing arts.

Perform Europe Grant

EUR 60,000

Partners

Shonen

France

Reykjavik Dance Festival

Iceland

Vo'Arte

Portugal

Viernulvier Kunstencentrum Vooruit vzw

Belgium

Artistic Works

Life's Form(s)

Producers: Shonen

text

What gestures would you keep, if movement became for you a stake, an objective, a fight deserving or needing your full attention? This necessity of the gesture brings together three dancers as human, sensitive, and relational prostheses, compensating for muscular and motor deficiencies of two performers, a former boxer and dancer respectively, now suffering loss of mobility. In a show combining performance and cinema, film sequences will show the dances of people unable to go on stage, while multiplying the modalities of presence of those who will be on it. Alongside the ‘human prostheses’ that the dancers will embody, a former boxer and a former dancer suffering from chronic diseases will be the link between their friends – present on the screen – and the stage space. Life’s form(s) (Forme(s) de vie in French) aims to restore a space of intimacy and collective composition, displacing the contemporary notion of the ‘augmented body’, at a time when the question of disability – and of a struggle for movement that concerns us all – remains relegated to the margins of our techno-scientific, competitive, and hygienic societies.