Cindy Van Acker

Cindy Van Acker trained as a ballet dancer in Anvers, began working as a choreographer in 1994 and founded the Greffe company in Geneva in 2002. Her writing occupies a singular territory; the starting point is always an indescribable shape. In her formal, abstract dancing she manipulates time, bodies, and materials, with an absent, or off-camera stance. She leaves no stone unturned in her quest to open imaginary and emotional spaces that go beyond shape. Her encounters with the choreographer Myriam Gourfink, the electronic musician Mika Vainio, the plastic artist Victor Roy, and the stage director Romeo Castellucci have had a major impact on her career. Cindy Van Acker has been an associate artist at the ADC in Geneva since 2017. Her company, Greffe, is currently looking for new creative and organisational avenues.

The thinking behind the workshop, and the backdrop to the time we spend together in June is the exploration of emotion in gestures, movement, posture, and attitude. Setting aside the gesture that represents, symbolises, or demonstrates, what emotion is there in an outstretched hand, the tilt of a head, or the position of a body in its entity? By suspending gesture, pressing pause, and letting the taste of the moment come about, we magnify its poetry and extract the essence of an emotion. We also seek to translate into movement, gesture, posture or attitude an emotion, whether acknowledged as such or emanating from an object, word, painting, or person.