This workshop explores real-time composition through the interconnected practice of body, time, space, and listening.

We begin with the body — not as an instrument that simply executes movement, but as a living, thinking, sensing organism. Through individual exploration, dancers bring attention not only to weight, breath, and articulation, but also to impulse, imagination, and playfulness as tools to free the body and mind.

From there, we explore time as compositional material. Time is not limited to speed or musical rhythm: it can expand, contract, accumulate, suspend, repeat, interrupt, or remain still. Dancers investigate their own temporality while learning to perceive and respond to the multiple rhythms and durations that coexist within a group.

Space and all its elements are alive and in constant dialogue in our practice: direction, air, light, sound, temperature, and even emptiness become active elements of the composition. Dancers practice reading what is already happening in the space and allowing that information to affect how they move.

Through solos, duets, and collective scores, listening becomes the central compositional practice. The aim is not to impose a composition on the moment, but to develop the physical and perceptual availability to recognize what is emerging and compose from within it — while it is happening.

LED BY:   Marcela Correa

Presented by Zero Point Arts / Zoe Dance

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Somerville Arts Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Marcela is in Somerville this fall to stage “Manipulo”, an improvisational performance being presented at SomArt @ the Hive Oct. 16 + 17. Find out more about the performance: https://zeropointarts.org/events/manipulo/