Embodied Practices: Horses Forces – Embodying Archive Images
Elisabete Finger
Dance Workshop
Elisabete Finger © Piotr Pietrus
The workshop departs from an archive of artistic, historical, and documentary images that portray diverse visual narratives of care across different times, cultures, and places. The central question in the archive is not what we care for, but how: what happens to the bodies of those who give and receive care? The workshop will navigate the archive, exploring different ways of embodying images and giving them flesh by replacing the original figures with the performers’ bodies as a strategy to study not only what is visible – gestures, postures, positions, and anatomical implications – but also what is invisible: the political, social, cultural, and ancestral forces that traverse and sustain the action.
By embodying these narratives, the performer becomes a medium for a system – stepping down from the rider’s seat and turning into horses ridden by unseen forces. From a single still image, would it be possible to sense past or future gestures? Engaging with principles inspired by systemic constellations and operational logics of AI-based image animation – translated into embodied experimentation – a static frame will gain movement and duration. Choreography might emerge from subtle developments of the central figure into a GIF, a loop, or a brief fictional continuation.
Visitor Information
For this workshop, we invite a diversity of bodies and ages. Participants can expect movement and breathing exercises, explorations of precise choreographic gestures, proximity, and consensual touch. The workshop is aimed at professional dance practitioners.
Language: English
Duration: 3 hours
Number of participants: max 15
Cast
With
Elisabete Finger
Cast
With
Elisabete Finger
Biographies
Elisabete Finger is a Brazilian choreographer based in Berlin. She studied dance and choreography in different places such as the Essais Program at the CNDC d’Angers (FR) and the MA SODA (UdK /HZT Berlin). In her creations she works with the rawness of bodies and materials, moving their anatomies, revealing insides and outsides, exposing textures, forms and fluids in images and situations that stand in the border between delight and disturbance, beauty and ugliness, delicacy and danger, often challenging social/cultural expectations. Her pieces have been presented in dance, performance and visual arts contexts, with the support of Brazilian and international institutions. In recent years in Germany she was a fellow of Martin Roth Initiative (2021-2022) as an associated artist at HZT/UdK, and later a resident artist at Radialsystem (2023), within the frame of Weltoffenes Berlin program. Finger is currently one of the recipients of Tanzpraxis 2024/2025.
Biographies
Elisabete Finger is a Brazilian choreographer based in Berlin. She studied dance and choreography in different places such as the Essais Program at the CNDC d’Angers (FR) and the MA SODA (UdK /HZT Berlin). In her creations she works with the rawness of bodies and materials, moving their anatomies, revealing insides and outsides, exposing textures, forms and fluids in images and situations that stand in the border between delight and disturbance, beauty and ugliness, delicacy and danger, often challenging social/cultural expectations. Her pieces have been presented in dance, performance and visual arts contexts, with the support of Brazilian and international institutions. In recent years in Germany she was a fellow of Martin Roth Initiative (2021-2022) as an associated artist at HZT/UdK, and later a resident artist at Radialsystem (2023), within the frame of Weltoffenes Berlin program. Finger is currently one of the recipients of Tanzpraxis 2024/2025.
Visitor Information
For this workshop, we invite a diversity of bodies and ages. Participants can expect movement and breathing exercises, explorations of precise choreographic gestures, proximity, and consensual touch. The workshop is aimed at professional dance practitioners.
Language: English
Duration: 3 hours
Number of participants: max 15
Credits
"Embodied Practices Extended" is part of the programme series "Conjunctions – Acts of Being in Relation". "Conjunctions" is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion as part of its cross-disciplinary funding programme. With support from the Radial Foundation.
Media partnerships Radialsystem: tip Berlin, The Berliner, Rausgegangen, taz. die tageszeitung
Credits
"Embodied Practices Extended" is part of the programme series "Conjunctions – Acts of Being in Relation". "Conjunctions" is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion as part of its cross-disciplinary funding programme. With support from the Radial Foundation.
Media partnerships Radialsystem: tip Berlin, The Berliner, Rausgegangen, taz. die tageszeitung
The workshop departs from an archive of artistic, historical, and documentary images that portray diverse visual narratives of care across different times, cultures, and places. The central question in the archive is not what we care for, but how: what happens to the bodies of those who give and receive care? The workshop will navigate the archive, exploring different ways of embodying images and giving them flesh by replacing the original figures with the performers’ bodies as a strategy to study not only what is visible – gestures, postures, positions, and anatomical implications – but also what is invisible: the political, social, cultural, and ancestral forces that traverse and sustain the action.
By embodying these narratives, the performer becomes a medium for a system – stepping down from the rider’s seat and turning into horses ridden by unseen forces. From a single still image, would it be possible to sense past or future gestures? Engaging with principles inspired by systemic constellations and operational logics of AI-based image animation – translated into embodied experimentation – a static frame will gain movement and duration. Choreography might emerge from subtle developments of the central figure into a GIF, a loop, or a brief fictional continuation.
Cast
With
Elisabete Finger
Biographies
Elisabete Finger is a Brazilian choreographer based in Berlin. She studied dance and choreography in different places such as the Essais Program at the CNDC d’Angers (FR) and the MA SODA (UdK /HZT Berlin). In her creations she works with the rawness of bodies and materials, moving their anatomies, revealing insides and outsides, exposing textures, forms and fluids in images and situations that stand in the border between delight and disturbance, beauty and ugliness, delicacy and danger, often challenging social/cultural expectations. Her pieces have been presented in dance, performance and visual arts contexts, with the support of Brazilian and international institutions. In recent years in Germany she was a fellow of Martin Roth Initiative (2021-2022) as an associated artist at HZT/UdK, and later a resident artist at Radialsystem (2023), within the frame of Weltoffenes Berlin program. Finger is currently one of the recipients of Tanzpraxis 2024/2025.
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