Collective Composition Workshop
July 11th 2026
from 11 – 2pm
Before the word, there was the body. So much of what we carry – what we feel, what we know, what we long to share – slips through the cracks of language. We reach for words and find them insufficient. Yet the body has always known another way.
Dance is not a language in the strict sense – it doesn’t have grammar, it doesn’t translate – and yet it speaks. Directly. Bodily. To something in us that recognizes itself in motion. This is the territory we enter together.
Togetherness. What binds us and makes us part of a community? Whether in private life, within a family, a self-chosen circle, or a group brought together by chance, how can shared experiences and journeys be fully lived and shaped together?
Collective Composition (improvisation) is about creating in the moment – together. We explore how individual impulses can connect, overlap, and form a shared dance language. The workshop offers space to tune into your own body, to listen, and to playfully build compositions in real time with others. The score we work with investigates both the mundane and the strange: fragments of everyday actions and continual re-compositions of new situations. By refining our individual and collective sense of space, time, and behavior, we ask: how do we communicate while collectively composing movement?
Listening. Action. Negotiation. Listening. Reflection. Shifting. Variation. Listening. Modification.
Where is verbal language needed, and where is it not? How can mutual agreements be made through the body – non-verbally – and when through spoken words?
For anyone with dance experience and curiosity about body awareness.
Language: German & English
Enrollment via e-mail: pattywoltman[at]gmail.com
Kunstraum Bethanien
Studio 2
Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin
