Contact
If you would like to know more, want to participate, book a dance workshop, or organize a performance of selfportrait24 in your home city, please email me at marcela@lakestudiosberlin.com, or fill out this form. For more info on my personal artistic work please visit: www.marcelagiesche.com
I am also available to meet anyone who would like mentoring or support with organizing dance related community events, curation/grant-writing, choreographic projects or running arts / dance spaces.
About Marcela:
Marcela Giesche (US/DE) was the 2024 Caroline Plummer Fellow in community dance at the University of Otago / Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. She is a freelance choreographer, performer, curator, researcher, dance teacher and founder/ artistic director of the dance venue LAKE Studios Berlin (www.lakestudiosberlin.com) in East Berlin. She has presented her choreographic work and shared her movement techniques internationally in schools, universities, festivals, companies, and dance studios with professionals and amateurs alike. You may find out more about Marcela and her artistic work here: www.marcelagiesche.com
Framework & Inspiration:
One of Marcela’s main goals in art making is to bring contemporary dance out of its bubble and make it more accessible to the general public: “I wish to open as many different minds and bodies to the transformative and communicative power of movement as possible.” With her work, she would also like to open people’s eyes to the idea that “all movement can be dance – it just depends on how it is framed and perceived”.
Dance, choreography, improvisation, and movement research can also include and connect with any other fields of study: we all have a body which we can get to know better. Embodied intelligence can significantly influence and contribute to new ways of learning, understanding our environment, and relating to one another.
Methods & Outreach:
As part of her proposed work within the Fellowship Marcela connected with diverse communities all over Ōtepoti – Dunedin and the University. The longest and most intensive phase of the project (March – August) consisted of an outreach program where Marcela offered free community movement workshops as well as regular open dance trainings in her dance and improvisation methods to University students, staff and the broader communities of Dunedin. The open trainings were designed for people with some prior movement experience, whereas the community workshops were geared towards people of varying ages, experience levels, backgrounds, and abilities. Both the classes and the workshops encouraged participants get to know their bodies, break down boundaries, and propose to them possibilities of perceiving the movement in their lives in a playful and improvised way.
Gradually through these ‘meetings through movement’, a group of 24 diverse participants emerged who dove with Marcela into the creation of the performance selfportrait24 : Ōtepoti- Dunedin. With these 24 people there was an intensive rehearsal process from August 30th – September 6th where short improvised movement solos were woven into a moving self-portrait of the city. The resulting performance selfportrait24: Ōtepoti – Dunedin was performed publicly at the New Athenaeum Theater on the weekend of September 7 & 8th, 2024, along with free dance workshops and creative activities for all ages.
selfportrait24 