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Choreographic workshop with Maria Metsalu
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Dancer Maria Metsalu twists her body on a floor of sand, with clothing and small metal balls by her


This workshop continues the performance and movement practice of Maria Metsalu as a solo artist and her collective Young Boy Dancing Group. The workshop consists of group choreographic instructions with a clear and substantial goal: to dance together, to embody feelings, to explore a sense of safety in stillness with one another.

Rather than a series of exercises, the workshop is offered to the participant as an intimate journey with a punk attitude towards dance and the possibility to allow ourselves to use vulnerability to dive deep into raw emotions.

This workshop is meant as a moment to rethink how to continue to nourish ourselves as we nourish others, it is meant to take seriously the desire to spend a life in art as a vocation not an accomplishment, it is meant to disrupt the point of view that that which is known is mastered and fixed.
Maria Metsalu (b. 1990) is an Estonian choreographer and artist, who graduated from SNDO (School for New Dance Development), Amsterdam in 2016. Metsalu considers performance as a radical space capable of creating new meanings and ways of seeing. She views performative experiences and performing deviance as possibilities through which one may reflect upon the state of things and become inspired to act, and through which collective memory can be created. She is interested in an emancipated audience and how the position of the spectator can be challenged, destabilised or abolished altogether. Her work seeks to proliferate meanings rather than systematise them into a clarity. Metsalu has an ongoing interest in the production of her own persona, self-mythologisation and autopoiesis. Through performative works that place her own body in the epicentre, Metsalu uses her body to explore contemporary issues, and often employs sexually loaded means of expression. Besides her solo work she is one of the founding members of performance collective Young Boy Dancing Group.
 

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A digitall warped image of dancer Maria Metsalu propped against the ledge of a rooftop with her foot
Maria Metsalu hangs from belts above a sand floor, holding candles in her mouth, fingers, and around her legs