Making performance integral
Laura Doehler
co-director of Exit Map
Dance and performance artist, teacher and choreographer
Laura initiates collective processes via Exit Map that install a fluid and sensitive connectivity between self and other. Together with Exit Map she produces work and events that people can participate in and witness. The shedding of boundaries of self and other and the integration of performance and practice as part of everyday life are recurring themes. Projects are brought to life in close dialogue with other people and artists to realize collective ownership defined by processes and embodied dialogues. The product is a new way of being in the world by rooting ourselves in a collective body and by tuning into motion and connectivity.
"Being mindfully and playfully alive while in direct negotiation with what is around me, weaving the trouble with the beautiful.
I attend regularly to what moves me with the Shared Practice and Openly Spaced Out (I call them shared secular rituals) in conversation and collaboration with other people and artists, to understand how movement as the vehicle of life allows us to reconnect to feeling alive and part of a wider social and environmental fabric. The findings are shared, directly influence and shape a community of people and environment there and then. They are deepened via research residencies, teaching, performance making, event building, zine making and performing.
To me the virtuosity of dance is a matter of awareness and articulation that manifests because we regularly attend to it and share it. Physically and verbally, technique manifests because we inquire, revisit and affirm. I suspend myself between the experiential and the objective. My aim is to understand movement to empower others, fuel connections and, along the way, shape this as a vessel that may hold peace for me too. Movement doesn’t stop where our bodies end. Being resident at The Green Community Centre and our outdoor nature places, Exit Map embarks on creating community events where personal research exists within a society, a place and time to shape pathways towards an intelligent and sensitive human and environmental ecology."
