Categories: Workshop

Date: June 8th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Ike Kamphof and Ruud Hendriks
Location: Misericordeplein, Maastricht
Language: English spoken

How can we attain knowledge of our bodily action and reflexes through the study of people who are extra sensitive to the wordless behavior of others? Ike Kamphof presents various possibilities of sensory existence and co-existence by exploring rhythms, mimetic mirroring and sensory details. These all play a large role in our daily, largely silent and subconscious interaction. Ruud Hendriks studies clowns specializing in dementia care, who seek to help people with this condition retain their sensory and emotional being in the world. He focuses on clowning as a technique to become extra-sensitive to the subtle, wordless expressions of persons with dementia. Training the Senses helps the clown go along with the patients and become attuned to their ways of being in the world. The clown also tries to find access to hidden capacities in people with dementia to stay sensitive and receptive to outside stimuli.

Date: May 11th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Tim Ingold
Location: Van Eyck Academie, Academieplein 1, Maastricht
Language: English spoken

Tim Ingold’s wide-ranging studies encourage us to re-appreciate alternative knowledge or, put differently, things our bodies know but we do not always act upon, such as acquired skills, sudden reflexes and marked intuition. With a focus on alternative ways to find knowledge, Ingold offers imaginative workshop tutorials that include weaving baskets and flying kites with students. Tim Ingold’s writings cover themes as far apart as humans and animals, sensing, education, skill, perception, making, materials and becoming. His most recent book, The Life of Lines, is a wonderful example of his achievements and a poetic narrative that interlaces bodies, minds, landscapes, topographies and perceptions through a correspondence of lines.

Date: March 30th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Jenny Slatman and Kenneth Meijer
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

The perception of heat, cold and pain, of being touched or moving our body, causes us to experience our bodies as inalienably ours. Yet other sensory experiences may cause us to suddenly perceive our body as strange and question the boundaries between our own and someone else’s body. Experiments demonstrate that we can easily fool ourselves into experiencing a fake hand as if it were part of our own body. Drawing on her own research, Jenny Slatman discusses various ways of experiencing one’s body, including illusionary ones, and explains them in terms of a dual sense of localization. Our embodied existence is open and confined at the same time because of its simultaneous being “here” and “there”. These concepts also provide input for new rehabilitation therapies. Kenneth Meijer presents some of the rehabilitation lessons learned at the new virtual reality lab(CAREN), where illusions are used to probe the human muscle-skeletal sensory system for basic research and diagnosis.

Date: 30 March
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Peter Klosse and Garmt Dijksterhuis
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

We live in a time in which we have higher and higher expectations of our food. We expect to be able to eat everything all year round. Food stores and restaurants offer exquisite dishes, rare combinations and stunning flavors to satisfy our curiosity for new culinary adventures. To make all this possible, the agri-food industry is developing increasingly sophisticated techniques for processing our food. Often, this food has already undergone a series of treatments before reaching the final stage: the preparation, presentation and development of taste. Large food companies have taste laboratories where scientists work on specific properties, flavors, fragrances and colors of the food in order to provide the consumer with a maximum experience. Despite the growing demand for pure food, authentic recipes and real herbs, much of our food still has a manufactured taste. Peter Klosse, professor of Gastronomy and owner of the famous hotel-restaurant De Echoput near Apeldoorn, provides insight into the science behind taste. Garmt Dijksterhuis, who has a lot of experience in the field of food-related perceptual science in academia and industry, explains how taste is shaped by both the eaten and the eater.

Date: February 24th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Anna Harris and Peggy Olislaegers
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

All of our cognitive abilities have a recognizable source: language, mathematics, music, schooling in a pedagogical rhythm of small incremental steps. But how do we train our senses? One can argue that we see colors by following conventions about what is blue, red or green. We develop our taste by practicing and talking about flavors in tasting sessions of wine or olive oil. Senses are like crafts in that you can learn to master them only by practicing. And yet we cannot quite put our finger on where and how we learn with our bodies. Or can we? This session starts with a physical warm-up to stimulate the senses. Peggy Olislaegers talks about methods for exploring artistic questions physically and ways in which dancers archive their physical experiences. Anna Harris’ presentation deals with different resources we use to teach and learn sensory awareness in contemporary life, from cookbooks and wine tasting smelling kits to mindfulness workshops and the lessons that doctors learn to train their sensory skills of clinical examination.

Date: November 15th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: David Helbich and Rudi Laermans
Location: De Brandweer

How do we experience our body when we are at the theater, listen to a concert or attend a lecture? And how do we experience the entire body of an audience, in relation to ourselves and the work or the act? How do they all influence each other? We discipline ourselves, sit still, focus our hearing and view the performance. Yet, we are also distracted, fidgety, whispering to partners, and playing with candy wrappers. David Helbich’s long-term project Audience Observations plays with this interaction. By echoing this happenings, he demonstrates its performative qualities and thus ponders on the relationship between public spaces and audience participation.

Date: October 4th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and Paul Devens
Location: De Brandweer

Through our senses we form mental representations of our own body and the space and events around it. These mental representations have an impact on our emotional, social, and motor functioning. Ana Tajadura-Jiménez’s research focuses on showing that these mental representations are not fixed. Her project The Hearing Body investigates how sensory feedback changes people’s experiences of their body and the surrounding space. The project has shown that real-time alteration of walking sounds results in a changed perception of one’s represented body size, and contributes positively to a person’s walking behavior and emotional state. Sound artist Paul Devens is interested in ways in which sound conditions behave. He will offer an artistic interpretation of the subject with practical examples and sound experiments.

Date: September 20th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Roger Kneebone, Jozef Youssef and Dusia Kneebone
Location: De Brandweer

Touch and the ‘knowledge of the hand’ are essential to surgery, cooking, science and the arts. This interactive event will explore how experts from diverse backgrounds can share insights in unexpected ways. Roger Kneebone (surgeon and educator), Jozef Youssef (leading chef and gastronomic researcher) and Dusia Kneebone (marine geologist, art historian and hat maker) have been investigating how the culinary concept of ‘mise-en-place’ – how experts organise their work at the intersection between hands, tools and materials – can play out in different disciplines. They will illustrate some of the techniques they use, invite the audience to experience ‘hand knowledge’ and to contribute their own perspectives.

Datum: 3 mei
Tijd: 19:00 – 21:00 uur
Met: Natasha Myers, Espen Sommer Eide en Thought Collider
Locatie: De Brandweer

We denken doorgaans aan natuur als iets dat buiten onszelf ligt, als een brede verwevenheid van dingen die stilletjes onze acties en observaties ondergaan. Maar wat als we onszelf als onderdeel zien van een omgeving die ons ervaart, net zo goed als deze door ons wordt ervaren? Wetenschappers vinden steeds meer bewijs van communicatienetwerken – relaties tussen planten, dieren en mensen –  waarvan slechts enkelen van ons zich bewust zijn. Planten communiceren een aanval van rupsen aan andere planten, die daarop meteen chemisch verdedigingsgif produceren. Bomen communiceren met elkaar via hun wortels. Zelfs mensen lijken te communiceren in een zintuiglijke omgeving waaraan gelijktijdig ook planten en dieren deelnemen. Natasha Myers verkent de “affective ecologies” die vorm krijgen tussen planten en mensen. Espen Sommer Eide volgt het zintuiglijke gedrag van dieren. Thought Collider onderzoekt de relatie tussen geur en gedachteprocessen door moleculen te traceren die betrokken zijn bij de verspreiding van ziektes.

Date: June 21st
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Jamie Ward and Christine Söffing
Location: De Brandweer

People with synesthesia experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways. To some, each letter has its own distinct color; to others, images are directly related to taste, the sequence of numbers glide through space, or music is an animated spectacle. Scientists are struggling to find a good explanation for this mixing of the senses. This explanation may help for instance to discover in exploring ways in which blind people can be made to see again by using their other senses? In his research, Jamie Ward explores the workings of the synaesthetical mind and brain. Christine Söffing collects observations about synaesthesia and uses her own color-hearing-synesthesia and her color-scent synaesthesia for her work in experimental music and sound- and scent-installations.

Date: April 19th
Time: 7 – 8 PM
With: Sara Wookey
Location: Marres, House for Contemporary Culture

Movement is the primary sense with which we explore our environment and give meaning to it. Building on her 20-year long experience, American choreographer Sara Wookey will engage in a public dialogue about the ways in which dancers and choreographers can provide new perspectives on space and movement. Wookey’s presentation will focus on the experiential being in the museum and aspects of the social and spatial conditions her work approaches and tests out. In addition, she will do a short experiential movement exercise.

Date: March 30th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Gijs Frieling and Aukje Dekker
Location: Marres, Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht

Painting is such an obvious visual phenomenon that we rarely experience it as a call to sensory action. Instead of acting upon them, we read and try to understand paintings. We contemplate their themes and meanings. We discuss expression, gesture, emotion, and even the rules of representation. We don’t smell the paint, touch or lick it. We don’t allow our bodies to follow the brushstrokes. We rarely lie down and find new perspectives. We don’t imitate figures or animals in paintings. Paintings are thus radically emancipated from bodily movement or broad sensory perception. Why is that? Many will say that the body is not needed in the appreciation of painting. Today we are going to explore the opposite.

Date: November 14th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Saskia Wilson-Brown, Laura Speed and Emma Crebolder
Location: De Brandweer

Smells form part of our knowing, but they are elusive, often disappearing before they can be pinned down with speech. Scents can bring us strong memories of places and events, yet we find it hard to identify even quite strong smells, including bleach, rosemary and lavender. Research shows that people growing up in some non-western cultures have a more developed vocabulary for scents. And that Europeans find it easier to identify scents, the more they talk about these scents. What is it that makes scents so significant yet difficult to grasp? In this session, we will be identifying and expressing smells with director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction Saskia Wilson-Brown, reading about scent with poet Emma Crebolder and analyzing the relationship between smells and words with neuro-scientist Laura Speed.

Date: October 10th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Katja Heitmann
Location: De Brandweer

Our skin keeps us from seeping into the world. The skin holds our insides together, and stops the outside world from coming in. Even though we notice our skin only with damage or signs of age, it is a unique organ, a tender, stretchy, soft, and ultimately porous boundary. It is the elastic and adaptable place of encounter, a territory where the inner fluid breathing landscape of the bodyself meets the outer changeable environment that we share with other humans, animals, plants, rocks and water. We learn through cultural codes to conform and adapt our bodily experiences to what seems appropriate to specific situations. Katja Heitmann is interested in how to choreograph the skin. In this workshop, we will zoom into the skin as a physical element. What is the role of the skin for the body? What are the smallest movements underlying it?

Date: September 12th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Emilie Sitzia, Wiel Kusters, Joachim Junghanss and Kim Reijntjens
Location: De Brandweer

More than a lack of sound, silence can be meditative, transgressive, religious, bored, manipulative, rhythmical, reticent, aesthetic, respectful, rebellious and much more. In this workshop we will bring together a range of specialists to discuss and experiment with the audience their experience of silence. Drawing on various perspectives (such as philosophy, literature, visual arts, psychology, performance art, music, etc.) we will explore the impact of silence. We will test its boundaries, investigate its moods, and map its sensory forces in behavior, reflexes and sound.

Date: July 11th
Time: 6 – 8 PM
With: Joeri Bruyninckx, Kristen Haring and Ulrike Scholtes
Location: De Brandweer

Translation of experience into language is one of the most formidable challenges of learning. Thousands of cookbooks seem to explain how to prepare exquisite meals. Yet, their success greatly depends on the author’s resourcefulness in finding a language that makes readers understand exactly how to handle kitchen equipment, apply cutting techniques, make their timing precise and know what it is they should taste. By focusing on how sensory vocabularies are shared, and how sensory experience is recorded, this session on fieldnotes targets some of these large gaps in our understanding about learning. How do we record observations, share them with others and acquire a skill? This session explores techniques of recording and coding the sensory ranging from tracking bird sounds, drawing yoga positions to knitting in morse code.

Date: June 13th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Mami Izumi and Emmanuelle Wackerle
Location: De Brandweer

Much of human movement is on foot. We need our body to bring us to work, school and the supermarket. But there is also a long tradition that relates walking to thought. The peripatetic school in ancient Greece derived its name from its habit to converse while walking, and Kant’s daily tour became famous as ‘the philopher’s walk.’ Robert Walser presented his walking as a philosophical object, Baudelaire invented ‘the flaneur’ and Stanley Brouwn turned walking into art. More than the simple body movement of shifting our weight from one foot to another to move forward, walking, then, is a tool to create, reflect and meditate. But how do our predispositions, handicaps and environment influence our sensory perception to bring about this contemplative shift?

Date: May 23rd
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: archigraphus
Location: De Brandweer

What is space? We all have a conception of it, but if we compare notes, everyone views it differently. We perceive space usually as the volume that surrounds us. We have ways of looking at specific spaces, whose boundaries we can mark visually: a rectangular room, a round hall, a small gallery. And we have a general concept about space with psychological qualities: breathing space, space of movement. We think of spaces as comfortable, haunting, hollow, warm or smelly. And some of them we sense to be unwelcoming and eerie. Today’s session with archigraphus is aimed at our awareness of all these routines, feelings, and intuitions of space. How do we perceive space and what vocabulary do we use to measure and map it? This will be a thoroughly practical workshop: we’re going to walk, do exercises, execute commissions, and share footage of unknown perspectives: watch, taste and imagine space!

Date: April 25th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Roderik Povel, Bernadette Jansma and Poetry Slammers: Loukia Hadjiyianni, Charis Hoffman, Sophie Malon and Alfie Marsden Smedley
Location: De Brandweer

The voice is our most formidable instrument for expression. The voice speaks, sings, moans, coughs, stammers, hesitates, recites, and sneezes. It helps us to communicate ideas, connect to other people, vent our moods and enthusiasms, sing songs, recite poetry, and command armies. Yet, even though the voice is an unquestioned instrument with which we express our identity, it seems also alien to us. We listen to our own recorded voice as if it belongs to another person. We can hear voices of people that are absent. Unsuspected things can cause us to have a failing voice, one that stammers, falls silent, or is temporarily lost. With help of poetry slammers, a jazz vocalist and a neurologist, we will explore in this event the ways in which our voices constantly mediate between our inner selves and the external world.

Date: March 21st
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Christopher Fitch and Mattijs van de Port
Location: De Brandweer
Language: English spoken

We tend to see the wild as something that belongs to deep nature: unbridled growth, primary impulses, animal behavior. Bears, wolves, lions are wild. And humans see it as their task to tame them. Animals are captured and brought to nature reserves and zoos, wild forests are developed as national parks. We create a wide gulf between what is human and what is ‘nature’, only to be uncomfortably bridged when we, as result of war, deprivation or sheer madness are confronted with the wild in ourselves or in the people around us. In the meantime, we also need as Henry David Thoreau passionately argued ‘the tonic of wildness.’ The wilderness reminds us of beautiful worlds that are remote and exotic, full of mysteries and unanswered questions. It also brings us into contact with the uncontrolled wildness that lurks deep inside us. In the context of the Marres exhibition Dreaming Awake, author Christopher Fitch and anthropologist Mattijs van der Port evoke, with the help of soundscapes and filmclips, the wild in our environment and ourselves.

Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Espen Sommer Eide, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, Martin Taxt
Location: Marres, House for Contemporary Culture
Language: English spoken

Inspired by the novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf, the Norwegian composer Espen Sommer Eide makes an eponymous spatial music album for Marres, which will  ‘live’ inside the house during the exhibition, and will be printed on vinyl. In the year preceding the opening of The Waves, Sommer Eide recorded in the different rooms of Marres in the night, in collaboration with the voice of Mari Kvien Brunvoll, and Martin Taxt on microtonal tuba. Jochem Vanden Ecker was invited to capture the entire process. With these recordings, Sommer Eide composes a series of works that succeed each other in space and to be listening to either separately or jointly. In taking this Training The Senses session Sommer Eide, Kvien Brunvoll and Taxt guide you through the entire creation of the exhibition.

Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Klara Ravat and Anna D’Errico
Location: De Brandweer
Language: English spoken

People are unaware of the power of their olfactory system in making life changing decisions. Smell is crucial in determining good food from bad food and detecting dangerous gases, but it also plays an essential role in choosing a partner. In this smell dating session, we will explore body odors. The smells of the participants are collected after an aerobics session. After being put in glass jars and numbered, the samples are passed around enabling everyone to find their match. In the meantime, participants converse with smell artist Klara Ravat and neurologist Anna D’Errico about the attraction of smells and the relationship between our brain, nose and hormonal system. What happens after this session, is up to you…

Date: September 5th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Aart Strootman and Genevieve Murphy
Location: De Brandweer
Language: English spoken

We are used to defining music as the product of bodies and instruments. As we train our body to play and listen, our bodies train the instrument to produce sound. The idea of mastery in music lies in the seamless match between body and instrument. We rarely discuss the requirements of a seamless match, or how it can be achieved, which means we need to search for the handicaps and exceptions to experience it.

What if the body does not function well enough to train the instrument, the instrument needs specific care, or different ways of playing it can affect the sounds of the instrument? What if we take the body itself as an instrument, tune it, and join it with other bodies? These questions are central at the first Training the Senses Fall Session, Sounding Bodies, with Aart Strootman and Genevieve Murphy.

Podcast

Sounding bodies

Date: June 12th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Elise ‘t Hart, Soundtrackcity, Annelies Jacobs, Marc Alberto
Location: De Brandweer
Language: English spoken

Sounds of Homes & Cities
What sounds frame our daily existence?

We register our daily existence as visual. Yet, our orientation is just as much dependent on sound. We listen carefully to sounds of cars, bicycles, busses, and subways when we navigate through the city, and we listen perhaps even more subtly to sound of coffeepots, laundry machines and moving chairs when we’re at home. These sounds are so intimately known to us, that they don’t reach our consciousness. Yet, when they fall away, we miss something. In this session, Marres explores the sounds of the everyday with artist Elise ‘t Hart, researcher Annelies Jacobs, artist initiative Soundtrackcity and musician Marc Albert.

Date: May 30th
Time: 10:30 AM – 1:30 PM
With: Alexis Blake
Location: Theater aan het Vrijthof
Language: English spoken
Special Workshop – Max 15 people.

Do you trust your body?
Do you know where in your body you store your different emotions?
What is your nervous system telling you?
Do you allow your body to process your daily thoughts and past traumas?
What is your body communicating to you that your mind refuses to listen to?

In this workshop Alexis Blake aims to guide our bodies to a state where they can move and respond honestly without filters. In doing so, we will be able to locate emotions held within the body and move towards creating space for expression and reflection. The workshop is part of the artist’s large-scale project, Anthology of Anger. In this project, she explores how culture, history and DNA influences one’s expression or suppression of emotions versus the body’s authentic movements of these emotions.

Date: May 29th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Katja Gruijters and ArtEZ Product Design Arnhem
Location: De Brandweer
Language: English spoken

Can we overcome the boundaries of taste?
In this session, we explore the associations and boundaries of the sensory world through a multitude of questions. How do we store sensory impulses in our memory archive? What is the meaning of sensory overload? Are food sensations comparable to other sensations, including for instance those of sex?

Supervised by food designer Katja Gruijters, students at ArtEZ Product Design Arnhem address these and other questions in a spectacular hands-on evening full of experiences.

Date: 17 April
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Katja Heitmann
Location: De Brandweer

How can we preserve movements that are in danger of extinction?
A choreography for the collarbone, a dance of belly button, belly fat and rib cage, the anatomy of a sigh. In September 2019, the German choreographer Katja Heitmann (1987) opens Museum Motus Mori with her dancers: a museum for the endangered movements. For six weeks, five hours a day, ten dancers take up the challenge of preserving dying movements. Every day they translate these into their bodies through choreographic sculptures. They zoom in on human motor skills and unravel them into anatomical patterns, structures, seemingly perpetual loops.

In this training session they take us into the process of creating this continuous moving exhibition.

Date: May 1st T
ime: 7 – 9 PM
With: Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen Location: Breulingstraat 18, 6211 SC Maastricht
Workshop – Max participants: 35

Staging an Ordinary Day
What is an everyday experience? Can it be grasped into text or theater? The artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen will give a presentation about their performance at Utrecht Central Station titled How can we know the dancer from the dance?. This presentation will provide a short training for participants to go outside and make their own detailed observations of theatrical events in everyday life. The results of these observations, in text, video and performances, will be shared afterwards. Breure & Van Hulzen

Date:

7 April 2022

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Anna Nina Runa Essendrop

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21, Maastricht

Language:

English

Fee:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

Please note: this workshop will be recorded via photography and film

A coproduction with iii

Human Experience is a physical, immersive live action role play (LARP) about the sensations we get from movement, touch and sensory experience. The LARP is played by two groups. One group is called Ancient Consciousnesses. They are floating minds that have existed in our world forever and understand basic concepts (like the concept of a human or a flower), but they have never tried to be physically in contact with anything. For the duration of the play, they materialize into human bodies in order to carefully experience the nuances in the way humans move and sense and to try to understand what it is like to be human and experience through a body.

This is where the second group enters the story. This group consists of the audience that is part of the fiction of the LARP. They are there to aid the Ancient Consciousnesses in their exploration by showing movements or describing sensations to them. The purpose of this LARP is to create a sensory awareness of what it is to experience everything anew.

Date:

17 May 2022

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Anna Harris, Kaisu Koski, Bart Schrier

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21, Maastricht

Language:

English

Costs:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

Please note: this workshop will be recorded via photography and film

Today, medical students practice their dissecting, stitching and carving skills on highly advanced materials and protheses. In the past, they had to work with simpler materials. In this context, fruit was both practically and metaphorically essential: oranges were used to learn how to inject and a peach served as a children’s skin.

In the workshop Operation Mango you will pick up the scalpel yourself and get started with these materials and techniques. Under the guidance of physician-anthropologist Anna Harris, surgeon Bart Schrier and artist Kaisu Koski, you will gain insight into a series of surgical practices. In turn, by attending closely to the fruit’s sensory qualities, we may discover comparative vocabularies that doctors might never have thought of before. A first-aid kit is provided!

Listen to the podcast episode here (or on Apple Podcast).

Date:

30 June 2022

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Rachel Warr and Will Houstoun

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21, Maastricht

Language:

English

Costs:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

Puppeteers and magicians are masters in directing your attention. They make you focus on one part of their performance and lose sight of the rest. This shows their skillful mastery of techniques, but also tells us something about our own way of perceiving.

In this session, we explore both angles. Puppetry director Rachel Warr and close-up magician Will Houstoun will share techniques they use to steer our perception and create illusions. In addition, we question the ways in which we focus and divide attention in relation to the outside world.

Listen to the podcast episode here (or on Apple Podcast).

Date:

Wednesday 27 October 2021

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Roel Heremans, Louis Schreel

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21, Maastricht

Language:

English

Fee:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

Please note: this workshop will be recorded via photography and film

Our first step in making the possible real is to imagine it. Our imagination has the peculiar power to constantly create, invent or enable new possibilities. By virtue of this peculiar power, we can all lead a kind of double life: an actual life led by our ego in a real and shared world, and an invented live led by our imaginary ego in our own private, fictive world. How do we invent these new possibilities, questions, and lives? And what in the world is imagination exactly?

For this Training the Senses-workshop, artist Roel Heremans and philosopher Louis Schreel join forces to explore different modalities of imagination. During the event Roel will present some of his interactive imagination compositions and you will explore the blurry borders between the real and the unreal. Together, they will dive into the phenomenology and neurophysiology of aesthetic experience, to see how the senses, emotion, and imagination together animate the mind.

Date:

Saturday 25 September 2021

Time:

10:00 – 13:00

With:

Yun Ingrid Lee, Karina Dukalska

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21, Maastricht

Language:

English

Costs:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

A coproduction with : WORM Rotterdam and iii

Scores are used in music, dance and performing arts as a way of recording or triggering compositions and choreographies. They can be read, interpreted and performed by the artists themselves, or by other performers. This workshop will look at how to make and read different kinds of scores using your body and voice.

We’ll be diving into topics such as: how can you develop a notation system that both captures what you want to communicate and can easily be interpreted by performers? What elements of a performance do we choose to include and leave out in a score?

In The Body as a Score-workshop we’ll be using text, speech, and graphic elements in our scores, and our bodies and voices as instruments. Please bring your own texts to work with (a recipe, a poem, a novel, etc.). No previous experience in any form of score-making is required.

Date:

23 November 2022

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Britt Hatzius & Thomas Tajo

Location:

Marres, House for Contemporary Culture
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht

Language:

English

Max participants:

12

Costs:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

During this workshop we will make photos and video recordings.

In this two-hour workshop, both sighted and non-sighted participants are invited to join us in an exploration of our non-visual senses. It will include an introduction to Echolocation (or Click Sonar), but more broadly consider how we collectively experience both each other and the spatial environment through our auditory and tactile senses. The idea is to try and articulate what these experiences ‘feel like’, what they ‘do’ to us or what they might trigger in us individually. Through exercises and intuitive explorations, we might discover potentially under-used or underdeveloped sensorial skills for use in our everyday lives.

Listen to the podcast episode here (or on Apple Podcast).

This event has been postponed from October 5 to November 9.

Date:

9 November 2022

Time:

19.00 – 21.00 uur

With:

Philippine Hoegen, Nirav Christophe and Carolien Stikker

Location:

De Brandweerkantine, Capucijnenstraat 21 Maastricht

Language:

English & Dutch

Max participants:

20

A lawyer who is defending her client, and an instrument maker who is tuning a violin will most probably refer to their activity as work, while the musician playing the same violin or a belly dancer taking the stage will probably refer to their work as performance. Most of us would not find it hard to see the performance of the latter two as work, but we might not have considered that most of the work we all do is in some way a performance, and that we tend to call upon different versions of ourselves to perform that work.

This Training the Senses session we will train the sense of ourselves, looking at who we are when we perform work. It is devoted to the working practices and gestures of everybody and anybody in whatever form of work they do. In the session, we will search for, and give the stage to, one or more of our working selves, using techniques including voice dialogue and polyphony, performative exercises, embodiment and interaction. In the course of the session, we will pay special attention to the collection, storing and sharing of these selves in writing, image and movement.

Date:

27 September 2022

Time:

19:00 – 21:00

With:

Davide Tidoni & Simone Evangelisti

Location:

De Brandweerkantine
Capucijnenstraat 21 Maastricht

Language:

English

Max participants:

12

Costs:

€5 (regular), €2.50 (students)

During this workshop we will make photos and video recordings.

Since 2009, Davide Tidoni has created listening scores exploring the active role of the listener and their agency to act within an acoustic field. Starting from the subjective experience of acoustic phenomena, such as filtering and reflection, the scores highlight the interaction among the physical nature of sound, its behavior in space, and the modulation of sound through body and movement.

In this workshop Davide Tidoni, together with dancer Simone Evangelisti, will invite participants to explore and investigate their own capacity to touch, filter, absorb, and block sound when realizing the performative potential of the scores. Through guided sequences and improvisational moments, participants will experiment in new ways to approach sound and listening as resources for developing movement and body awareness.

This event is in partnership with iii.