“Overground Physical Theatre Company trespasses the boundaries of conventional form and offers a new depth of vision. Avatar tools draw from renown theatre reformers to conceive an enigmatic patchwork of Jerzhi Grotovsky, Bertold Breht, Antonin Artaud and Pina Bausch…”
Anthony Patellis – La Mama, NY
Our Cutting-Edge Methods
Ecorporeality
Ecorporeality Self-Refinery is Overground’s educational platform for awakening somatic intelligence through the art and practice of embodied mindfulness. Ancient and modern eco-somatic practices for cultivating corporal awareness are examined as students immerse into a process of distilling the body’s awareness in the multiple realities of the self.
Ecorporeality explores the ecology of the body as an ecosystem where reality, identity and perception meet. From this meet point a plethora of experiences emerges.
Our methods draw on diverse styles of physical theater and dance, experiential anatomy, somatic psychology, contact improvisation, Yoga, martial arts, and holistic science.
Our aim is to immerse performing artists into contemporary dance, guided visualizations, contact improvisations and somatic exploration to access an unadulterated reservoir of knowledge, spirit, and perceptive awareness.
The novel methods are geared towards honing the sentient body by unleashing authenticity rather than originality. The idea is to bring together both a cognitive and conceptual understanding with personal and experiential research, facilitated by movement, voice, and breath.
As students hone their sentient bodies they are able to unleash deeper sensations to generate physical metaphors. They explore the interconnected levels of existence - from the movement of the smallest cell to the dynamic flow… Only to realize: that the body is a changing reality, a coherent flow of energy embodied in physical form.
Cohera Move
Cohera Move, a branch of Ecorporeality, is Overground’s signature experimental dance lab for creating Coherent Movement. Cohere Move is a somatic-sensory experimental dance approach that uses corporal and vocal energy states to reveal a largely untapped reservoir of knowledge, spirit and perceptive awareness. It challenges post-modernist concepts of deconstruction and eclecticism, and calls for a revival of coherent dance as a spiritual pursuit.
The body is viewed as a site of overlapping realities in which the subject’s identity reflects his attitude towards the world. Targeted flow-inducing exercises signal the body’s urgent call, and its return to the organic patterns of life. Performers are guided into creative visualizations, energetic flow routines and psycho-physical tasks to acknowledge the body’s ecology as the sum of its inner and outer environment. The method focuses on authenticity, rather than originality, and traces how raw movement grows out of vulnerability and transforms into distilled neutrality – a sophisticated way of making the intangible tangible.
The Style:
The body’s intelligence to ride Earthly vortices awakens, as the performer finds the multiple projections of every seed action reflected as the continuity of coherent form. The minting of a new vocabulary gives freedom to moving with abandonment and precision, release and focus, as the body pulsates from the realm of the abstract into the concrete, from the mundane into the spiritual. Modern dance coined alphabetical techniques, postmodern and contemporary dance overthrew existing dance codes finding new ways of relating and communicating. The ultra-hip “Cohera Move” approach builds on both. It offers an alternative vision to movement by re-defining accepted notions of form, content, shape and dimension, and immersing dancers into a multi-dimensional universe of self-transcendence and nuance. The technique harnesses the transformational quality of energy, as an inexhaustible reservoir of information and intelligent design. Coherent form is optimal, continuous, efficient and self-sustaining, ancient and relevant – there’s nothing to take away, nothing to add.
