Workshop 

Facilitators: Zen Jefferson & Andrew Champlin

Mirror Mirror is a movement laboratory facilitated by two artists who have “transitioned” out of orthodox dance training models based on queer necessity. The workshop offers students a space to explore ballet and musicality in an interdisciplinary and reflexive way. Following the demand for institutions to strengthen their relationship to feminist pedagogy and anti-racist practices, the workshop aims to de-center dominant structures (i.e. Western “tradition” or, “the canon” or, “class”) conscientiously. 

During the workshop, students encounter an interruption of pedagogical norms. Participating inside a deconstruction of ballet technique, critical awareness is inscribed as traditional logics of advancement are suspended. Facilitators create a temporary container for fabulation: What if ballet class had a DJ interested in producing sound that dancers can respond to and be affected by? What if the ballet instructor brought pleasure to the forefront of technique lessons?

Recasting ballet’s historical baggage into a realm of possibility, students find a way of working inside a container of their co-creation—a liminal space that produces a unique type of rigour, which is expressive, embodied, risk-taking, and relational. 

The principles: 

• The all-knowing Not-knowing 

• Resist notions of mastery — expanding notions of ideal; allowing feelings to be there; and becoming aware of tendencies toward mastery, hierarchy, and disposability. 

• Integrate decolonial discourse — questioning the establishment of standards and norms that make institutions exclusionary.

• Tease power — suspending ordinary directions of power.

The range of undertakings: 

• Experimental musicality — class is supported and informed by live DJ soundscapes where participants experience the pleasure of embodying emergent time signatures and oscillate between contexts of disco, performance, and pedagogical space.

• Technique and motion— learning and deconstructing certain movements from ballet vocabulary, students explore the relationship between positions, movement, and rhythm, blurring the lines between classical “steps,” emergent movement, and social dancing. 

• Scores — working in small and big groups, we craft and share ideas to embody; scores and structures are made to integrate live DJ music with movement.

• Check-ins —fueled by texts exploring themes of civil rights struggles and black feminist history, Zen and Andrew facilitate conversations that give participants space to address their thoughts and feelings about society and subject-hood in and outside the dance studio. 

Background

This workshop was originally launched as a semester-long course in Winter 2020 at HZT Berlin in the BA program, Dance, Context, Choreography. The course was titled, Ballet in Times of Change or why the pleasant face?

Zen Jefferson and Andrew Champlin instigated Mirror Mirror with the desire to develop the research and connect with a wider range of students and institutions. If progressive politics is a goal in experimental dance education, creative spaces to reflect on dominant dance forms assist in the process of unmaking colonial attitudes.  

Facilitator Bios

Zen Jefferson

Zen Jefferson is a Bessie nominated Swiss - American - British performer, DJ and sound collage artist based in Berlin. In 2006, they graduated with a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School. For the past 14 years, Zen has performed with choreographers/companies in Europe, Asia & Africa including Jumatatu Poe, Sonya Lindfors, Michael Keegan Dolan & Moya Michaels, amongst others. 

Interests in the radical healing and transformative poetics of sound has led Zen to creating sound design scores for theater / performance / lectures and film, co hosting a monthly radio show entitled Poetic Healing w/ Zen & Kondo : a radical sonic expansion of Black Love.

Zen’s collaborations and practice interrogate the intersections of racial politics within performance, identity politics, ritual and healing that seek to disrupt the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, using the body, sound and community as a transformative vessel for immersive healing.

Andrew Champlin

Andrew Champlin is a Bessie nominated American performer, choreographer and educator based in Berlin. After training in Balanchine Technique at The School of American Ballet and receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology and dance from The New School University, Andrew collaborated with David Gordon, Xavier le Roy, Miguel Gutierrez, and Pam Tanowitz, among other choreographers. 

In 2013, Andrew began assisting Janet Panetta in New York and Europe. In 2015, he began teaching ballet following Panetta's example of how ballet can be deconstructed and positioned as a useful tool for dancers across a spectrum of interests and backgrounds. Andrew aspires to offer students access to high-level skills while facilitating their aesthetic and ethical relationships to movement and creative process.

In 2019, Andrew received a Master of Arts degree in choreography from Stockholm University of the Arts, DOCH School of Dance and Circus in the program New Performative Practices. During this period of study, Andrew began teaching at HZT Berlin where he continues to teach and mentor in the BA: Dance, Context, Choreography, and MA SODA. In 2021, Andrew joined the pre-PhD program PEERS at ZHdK in Zurich where he is developing Doctoral research in transgressive pedagogy and de-colonial ballet practice. 

Different Available Teaching Formats

Depending on the number of students, existing weekly schedules and context specificities, the workshop can be offered as a one week, two week, or three week frame. The longer the workshop is able to sustain, the deeper the experience for students (and institutions). To build a frame that works best, the workshop facilitators propose a conversation with program directors as a starting point.

Contact

To discuss the workshop please contact Andrew Champlin:

andrewchamplin@gmail.com