Back in May 2019, The Cube played host to a a sell-out show about grief, death and transformation: THE BIRTH OF DEATH. Director Yael Karavan returns with an ambitious new project exploring our collective and embodied response to the ecological crisis, in collaboration with director Rita Vilhena, entitled Our Skin.

"The primal intention is to re-establish and to strengthen contact with and empathy towards our environment, towards nature. We feel it is urgent to reflect, as a global society, about our relationship with planet earth."

Join us for a pair of workshops on Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th – no performing experience necessary.

In this workshop Yael and Rita explore with participants the ideas that inspired the creation process of their dance film project Our Skin. This will include experiential exercises taking in the Anthropocene, climate and eco-feminism*. Together with the participants, they will devise a performative action that will follow the screening of the film at the Cube Microplex on Friday the 24th of June.

The workshops will consist of two days, three hours each day. Participants should take into consideration that they will need to be present on both days and that they will be taking part part in the performance action following the dance film screening on Friday 24th of June.

*ecofeminism is an ideology and movement that sees climate change, gender equality, and social injustice more broadly as intrinsically related issues, all tied to masculine dominance in society. According to Françoise d'Eaubonne, "relates the oppression and domination of all marginalized groups (women, people of another ethnicity, children, the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature (animals, land, water, air, etc.)"

We see this project as a public art work, aiming to reach diverse communities regardless of their financial background, class and/or artistic inclination. We wish to bring back nature to different urban spaces where it once thrived, and thus remind ourselves that we are not independent from it. The film is designed to be projected in large format on the facades of buildings in the city, visible to passers-by in the street or in galleries and/or museums, or in dance film festivals. We want to bring back the presence of wild nature into urban spaces.

YAEL KARAVAN Award-winning Israeli/British performer, dancer and director, Yael has traveled throughout Europe, Russia, Brazil and Japan studying with numerous masters in search of an authentic training method and a contemporary physical language of expression bridging between east and west, dance and theatre. Specializing in Butoh, Karavan combines strong visual elements with dance, mime, physical and visual theatre, often in a site specific context. She explores way to act and react to current pressing socio-political issue. Recurring themes in her work include memory, metamorphosis, the invisible and the notion of repetitive cycles, balancing between dream and reality, the tragic and the comic, the intimate and the collective. Since 1999 she has been working professionally, performing in festivals, galleries and museums, teaching in schools and universities worldwide, creating numerous performances for herself and others around the world and was, among others, member of multiple Award-winning Russian dance theatre company 'Derevo' as well as Tadashi Endo’s 'Mamu Dance theatre’. In 2009 she created the Karavan Ensemble, an award winning international dance theatre and site specific company.
www.yaelkaravan.com / www.karavanensemble.com

RITA VILHENA Maker, performer and interpreter. Professional dancer/ maker since 2003, has as main motivation the idea of transformation and participation, moved by intuition and pleasure. Her last works #VIBRA #DOR and CORPO SANTO are a mark of her artistic trajectory with interest in ritual and performance, and currently with MA-MA and Pela Nossa Pele, in anthropocene and ecofeminism. In 2005 she created and directed Baila Louca improvisation and performance in Rotterdam, a platform that nurtured several international collaborations with choreographers, dancers and musicians. In Portugal she is founding member and artistic director of Partícula Extravagante association. Since 2005, active member of the Contact Improvisation practice, she facilitates CI around the world and co organizes the Festival Portugal Contacto Improvisação and the Partícula Extravagante CI. Currently she teaches at the Escola Superior de Dança in Lisbon and attends a PhD in Artistic Studies - Art and Mediations at the FCSH. She is currently a member of the research group Performance and Cognition - ICNOVA.