Motion Qualia Workshop with Satoshi Kudo

18.+19.01.2025, 15:00–18:30

Level: Advanced/ Dancers

Motion Qualia Workshop

Based on Kudo’s original movement theory “Motion Qualia” you’ll learn how to stimulate your brain to deliberately lose balance by provoking your reflexes which induce inevitable movement.

The work begins with physical practice of movement theory foundations to recognize the motion between being on and off-balance. This increases awareness of the constant movement surrounding you. Through guidance you’ll develop tools to follow disequilibrium through the experience of falling.

At the starting point you’ll learn how to disengage with your own equilibrium, enabling your body to float and eventually start to fall. This insecure state provokes the amygdala and activates a reflex. Normally this reflex moves you back into a secure place, but once learning constant awareness to this reflex through embodying theory, you are able to manipulate it into purposeful “miscalculation”. The eventual ongoing falling out of balance gives you the potential to continuously provoke your reflexes and bring about a constant flow. This process transforms the movement into something inevitable.

We see this when a dancer loses control on stage, worrying the viewer, but in the next moment catches their own body back into flow, as it was always supposed to be. Because the mirror neurons in the viewer’s amygdala respond to the dancer’s, the viewer experiences a simulated sensation of what the dancer’s embodied experience, which creates a moment of emotional sympathy.

“Motion Qualia” encourage you to release local control of the body by embracing control in a bigger sense through the physics of gravity and body. This composition of movement emphasizes sensuous dynamism as expression combined with aesthetics.

Photo by Håkan Larsson