Pau Aran
Contemporary for Dancers
14.02.–17.02.23, 12:00–13:30
Training for Dancers
Bio
Pau Aran was born in Barcelona where he studied Ballet and took classes in Contemporary Dance, at the age of 22 he transferred to Madrid. When he met Malou Airaudo in Paris, he was offered the opportunity to take part in an audition at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. Pau was accepted and began training in the 3rd year of the B.A Program in 2005 and thereafter joined Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2006, where he stayed until the end of the season 2019/20. He danced in a total of 25 pieces, delving into the complexity of Pina Bausch’s movement language.
Since 2013 Pau has been working as a freelance artist while still being a member of the ensemble in Wuppertal. He has guest choreographed and danced in Germany, Spain, UK, Japan and Italy over the last years. Since 2020, as well as focusing on his choreographic work, he has been passing on the experience he has gathered as a freelance dancer and teacher to the next generation.
Class Description
Atelier refers to my pedagogical proposal, which comes after a long career as a professional dancer and as an emerging independent creator.
It also honours the ‘workshop’ as a place of experimentation and craft creation. For me, the dance studio is like a workshop where we learn, practice and improve our technique / crafts(wo)manship and find a creative identity. My passion is to keep widening and deepening my perception of the world, and to fine tune its physical expression through my own body and in collaboration with others. I don’t want to cling on to what I have learned, but find new ways to share it with contemporaries and future artists. I want to maintain a connection between the Western dance techniques of the past, which continue to shape contemporary dance today, and the further development of my work as a dance facilitator. In my methodology I propose a work based on the compositional factors of dance, according to the dancer, choreographer and pedagogue Jean Cébron (1927-2019): energy, form, space and rhythm. The Jooss-Leeder method inspires much of my class. Respecting the different needs and circumstances of the group, I focus on breathing, repetition and opposing directional forces. At the end of the training, we conclude with a sequence containing the information studied during the session. Dancers will connect with authenticity but also confront their self-demands and develop a greater awareness of their limits in order to overcome them. Thus, through guidelines and keywords, the group will explore a resilient, open and autonomous way of thinking about creativity. An invitation to self-reliance, but also to a collective process of discovery, questioning and expansion.
