research or die.
summer | main event
running from the 1st to the 28th of july 2024
© panu isoaho
© petri summanen
b12 summer main event
— // —location: eden***** studios
Annamari Keskinen & ryan mason
thar be dragons
infinite singularities
the work of thar be dragons explores the poetics of dance, theatre, and performance art. their practice incorporates methods to develop psychophysical material and performative possibilities. this workshop provides creative tools for participants to engage with and integrate into their practice. we will explore our capacity to build bridges between the ineffable virtual spaces of our individual and collective minds to the actual spaces of our bodies and the material around us. we draw upon the voice, the rhizomatic body, and a zero-state, where potentials can emerge to strengthen these connections. this approach develops a fluidity that allows us to shift and morph who and what we are, at any given moment. thar be dragons is committed to artistic research within the frame of playful, safe, and brave spaces. this workshop is highly exploratory, and we encourage a curious approach to each practice and its limitless potential.
please be aware of our early bird special offer for this workshop! you can apply for this offer up until the 24th of march 2024. after the 24th the regular workshop fee applies. applications are accepted up until one day before the workshops starts.
biography / Annamari Keskinen
Annamari Keskinen, born in 1985, is a Finnish performer and choreographer, and one of the founding members of dance theatre company Thar Be Dragons. for The last 18 years, Annamari has been working internationally in the field of dance. Her professional career consists of over 60 productions, including her own choreographic creations. Annamari’s staged works live within sustained psycho-physical spaces, suspending both audience and performers in states of contrast, pathos, empathy, and reflection. In her works and teaching, she draws upon her experience as a choreographer and performer to guide participants through multilayered states of research and performance. Her recent inquiries in movement research explore psychological and physical attunements within intense atmospheric and sonic topographies. 'At the center of my artistic work, resesarch and performance is vulnerability and what it means to embrace it and breathe with it. I am endlessly inspired by the oscillations of the approach and withdrawal and transcendence of this place; where the vibrating edges within ourselves soften and fold into each other.'
biography / ryan mason
Ryan Mason is a choreographer, performer, and teacher based in Helsinki, Finland. In 2018, he co-founded, with his partner, Annamari Keskinen, Thar Be Dragons - a dance theatre platform for research, education, and performance. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance and Choreography, in 2007. His work is a detailed approach often involving layers of sustained improvisational states within movement and psychological parameters. Ryan searches for enigmatic situations, taking them apart to look at them - for their absurdity, as well as for their sensory possibilities. Ryan danced with the José Limón Company, in NYC, later joining the company of Johannes Wieland at the Staatstheater Kassel, in Germany. There he also served as rehearsal director for two years. Ryan has been choreographing and teaching at higher-level institutions and workshops throughout Europe and North America, such as Springboard Danse Montreal, Hubbard Street Pro, SEAD, NYU Tisch, Anton Bruckner Privatuni, among many others. Ryan is currently working towards his MA in Choreography at TeaK, University of Arts Helsinki.
company info
thar be dragons
Thar Be Dragons is a platform for theatrical dance research, education, and performance, created by Annamari Keskinen and Ryan Mason in 2018. The company functions as a platform for both choreographers to create and present their collaborative and personal works. Their research explores notions of subconscious communication, revealing dense and sometimes unseen intimacy between the layers of our inner landscapes. Their staged work shifts between rapid changes of mood, sustained states of tension, and layered imagery, often encircling themes of death, the unknowable, the paradoxical, borders, silence, light, the mystical, and the quotidian.
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