- New alliances
Approaching architecture through choreography and as choreography, Dancing Architects cross-pollinate architecture with contemporary dance. Curiosity is to experiment with movement as an agency and medium for perceiving, experiencing, articulating and conceiving architecture. Direct engagement with movement is another form of learning by doing that reactivates our physical spatial intelligence we all have. It opens up our sensibility towards more relational perspectives through embodiment, expression and communication. As we become the medium itself, it brings changes as to how we see, interpret and relate to the world around us. Working with movement enables us to naturally engage with human aspects of senses and emotions; and the intangibles and invisibles as invaluable values for the experience of space. Dancing Architects hopes to inspire dialogues on empathy and care in architecture as well as to cultivate trust and togetherness contributing to our future wellbeing and happiness.
Dancing Architects’ first summer workshop took place in Apulia, Italy in July 2019. The plan for the future is to explore different cities in the world through workshops and events, engaging with various urban and cultural landscapes by moving; and moving together.
‘Architectural Body // Urban Choreography’ was the theme for Dancing Architects workshop in the summer of 2019. The streetscapes of the white city of Ostuni in Apulia was the stage for our urban choreography as the reading of the city. We explored its urban constructs, textures, materiality and sounds, while occupying and playing with spaces and environment by directly engaging with our bodies.
The experience in choreographic engagement in the city of Ostuni was brought back to the studio and its surrounding landscape. These displaced movements became one of the seeds for the experimental architectural dialogue in the form of performance.
The site is surrounded by magnificent olive trees over the undulating landscape of Southern Italy. We interpreted and re-enacted our urban choreography in the new context with our physical memory and woven a travelling narrative of performance as experimental architectural dialogue.
Dancing Architects workshop explores playful design potentials of movement in various ways – one of which is drawing live to capture the movement as spontaneous notations.
