TECHNOSOMATICS

Frédéric Gies offers collective, social experiences; a safe space where you can escape social dictates, experience solitude together and enter different states of consciousness.

Tickets: The performance workshop is free and open to everyone – but booking is required

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP

Frédéric Gies TECHNOSOMATICS sessions bring to the forefront the capacity of dance, as a movement practice, to express without having to demonstrate absolutes. Drawing from their clubbing and raving practices and their study of the experiential body, Gies offers dance floor experiences as a somatic practice. Their participatory dances recompose, recycle, and pervert dance histories and heritages in favor of collective embodied explorations. Gies playfully collapses the distinction and hierarchies between scholarly and popular forms of dance, as well as between anatomical maps of different origins. TECHNOSOMATICS explores the connection between embodied anatomy and techno music, clubbing and rave cultures, by letting bodies become instigators of movement that do not reinforce identities, but rather excavate the complexity of many layers, surrendering to the desires and forces within dancing bodies.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Frédéric Gies started their career as a dancer in the early 1990s in France. They danced with choreographers such as Daniel Larrieu, Olivia Grandville, Jean-François Duroure, Odile Duboc, Bernard Glandier and Christophe Haleb. During this period, they started creating their first pieces in collaboration with other dancers (Odile Seitz, Frédéric de Carlo). In 2004, they moved to Berlin and in 2006, they created the internationally successful piece Dance (Praticable). As they moved to Sweden in 2014, they initiated their work with techno music and started to develop their practice TECHNOSOMATICS..

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PERFORMANCE BULLETIN

Den Frie and Toaster presents the upcoming performance festival The Performance Bulletin, which will take place June 5-8 2025. Together with Danish and international performance artists, we investigate how situational performance pieces can introduce alternative ways of engaging and experiencing contemporary art.  Formed by artistic actions that disrupts our attention and opens the senses, the program asks what kinds of imaginations can be activated through embodied, situated, and processual performances.

The program is based on close collaborations with artists, who experiment with everything from feminist openings of symbols and monuments in the city, to collective dance ecstasies, vocal performances, joints dinners, performative explorations of the city’s infrastructure,s and traffic hubs, to as well as performance pieces that slow down the paste pace and enhance our sensitivity. Improvisation and movement are central forces in the program, which experiment with access and negotiate of the use of the public space. Celebrating the unexpected, indeterminate, and estranged impulse of performances, the program tests public attention and social processes by the happening of art.

The program is curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm in close collaborations and dialogue with the artists and the, Toaster and Den Frie curatorial teams. The program is generously supported by New Carlsberg Foundation, Bikuben Foundation, Danish Arts Council and Roskilde University.