Platform “Without Distance”

Educational platform “Without Distance” 2023 is part of the project “Life Long Burning – Future Lost and Found (LLB 3), and implemented with the financial support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the “Culture” Programme of the Sofia Municipality, the National Culture Fund under the Programme “Recovery and Development of Private Cultural Organizations”, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Bulgarien.

In his workshop the choreographer Sergiu Matis will share some of the secret tools of his way of making dance, being developed since 2013 as the Visible Thinking Body practice (VTB).  VTB are ways of navigating and thinking the body in motion. What kind of thinking can be made visible in action and how does it become a dance?

Matis will lead the participants through the process of the initial stillness and noticing the inner groove, detecting the initiation of movements, then recognising the personal drive to sustain and guide them towards imaginative dynamics. At the end of this exercise lurk big questions: what moves us today, how to sustain future big storms, what to fight for and when to soften. These questions reflect on the role of dance today, along and within the nature-culture-technology continuum.

Sergiu Matis is a Romanian choreographer born in 1981 in Cluj-Napoca. He received his dance education at the Liceul de Coregrafie in Cluj and the Mannheim Academy of Dance, and began his career at Tanztheater Nuremberg. He has been living and working in Berlin since 2008, creating his own works such as Keep It Real (2013), Explicit Content (2015), Neverendings (2017), Hopeless. (2019), UNREST (2021), DRANG (2022) and Blazing Worlds (2023). He has led workshops and educational activities at a range of institutions worldwide. In 2014 he completed his masters in Solo/Dance/Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) / Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).