Research residency
© Congress of Freaks at Ringling Brother, 1924

PROJECT

Research residency

Charlotte about her residency in wpZimmer:

After making my three performances EPIC FAIL, Loophole and ChitChat, I feel the urge to explore new ways to translate the theme of imperfection on stage through a long-term research.

Dance is still accompanied by the romanticization and glorification of the perfect body, a beautiful body that can’t do things that other people can. I want to investigate how I can extract dance from this context in my own work. For this I start with the question of how our society deals with the (imperfect) body. We live in a society of validism, a society in which we mainly express ourselves through what we can do or what we look like. We like to associate ourselves with what or who is successful and beautiful. Freak shows in which people with disabilities, deformations, diseases and foreign bodies were exhibited have fortunately been behind us. But the thought of ‘we are normal and they are abnormal’ still alientes us from other bodies. Therefore I want to investigate in what form I can confront dance and reality by using documentary material on stage and creating new movement material in relation to it.

I am doing research on dance as a documentary and the limitation of the body. How can I transform the documentary medium into a dance language? I want to find tools to interweave fiction and reality on stage: how can I bring reality in a creative way? Just like in a documentary, I want to learn how the maker tries to give an image of an aspect of reality. Here I do research into the limitation of the body. I investigate different bodies, each of which is dependent on its own body in its own way, with the question: how do we deal with physical limitation and dependence?

I divide my research over a period of six months (2019-2020) with two residencies at wp Zimmer. Other residency partners are Het Paleis, De Grote Post, C-stroke, De NWE Vorst and Les Ballets C de la B.

Charlotte Goesaert

1987 ◊ BE
Charlotte Goesaert is a Belgian choreographer and dancer, who graduated in 2009 as a dancer at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg. She danced with the Ro Theater, Meekers, in Belgium with Tuning People, Theatergroep Skagen, Romeo Castellucci, in Portugal with Olga Roriz and in Germany with Bodytalk. As a choreographer Charlotte worked at the Ro Theater, Likeminds and Productiehuis Rotterdam. In 2015 she made her first performance EPIC FAIL and the successor Loophole was released in 2018. These performances toured mainly in Dutch theatres and festivals such as Tweetakt, Motel Mozaique, Theater Rotterdam and De Brakke Grond. Then in 2019 she made the dance performance ChitChat, a collaboration with Karolien Verlinden of Tuning People. The failing human being is a recurring theme in her work. In a humorous and radical way, she always looks for ways to bring people and dance, reality and art together in her performances.