In the autumn of 2020, a movement laboratory was tested out as a semester long experimental movement course at HZT Berlin in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured regularly over fifteen weeks in a semester, students entered 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 aimed to de-stabilize “classic” conscientiously. 

During the workshop, students encounter an interruption of pedagogical norms. Participating inside a deconstruction of ballet technique, critical awareness was brought through modes of exchange structured into the teaching format, which was part dance training, part discussion, and part free improvisation to live soundscapes by the DJ and pedagogical work of Zen Jefferson. As artists and teachers, we asked ourselves how we could continue to work with movement principles of ballet while radically re-imagining the social conditions that process takes place inside. What if ballet class had a DJ interested in producing contemporary soundscapes that dancers can respond to and be affected by? How could ballet instruction be with the contemporary political moment?

The principles: 

• The all-knowing Not-knowing — recasting ballet’s historical baggage into a realm of possibility, students find a way of working inside a container of their co-creation.

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

• Integrate de-colonial 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.

• Reading – Authors, activists and artists such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Audre Lorde, and bel hooks lead as Zen and Andrew come from a United States Context and are most familiar with race discourse from that geographical position.

• 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 subjectivity in and outside the dance studio. 

Zen Jefferson Biography

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