This topic is closer to Bogi’s heart, as she has been practicing drawing and painting for a long time and has a lot of experience. She could combine her passion for drawing with her other passion, dancing. We came up with several great ideas, and the topic showed a lot of potential. We spent a whole month on research and even had a performance opportunity to deepen our research with a live audience.

We experimented with dancing what we saw around us. We drew inspiration from drawings; sometimes we sketched inspired by the dance we saw. Later, we created a dialogue with these sequences between the dancer and the artist.

We made this dialogue live and more visible by projecting our hands and the page onto the wall. This allowed the artist and the dancer to interact with each other in real-time, reacting to the smallest changes in the picture or the body.

We started the workshop with a short introduction round and asked the participants to draw one of their happiest moments from the past week. We asked them to keep their happy memories a secret and not to share the story behind the drawing. We collected these drawings for later use.

We then got into pairs: while the dancer moved around the space, the artist followed the dancer’s movements with their pen on the paper. When I was the dancer, I imagined I was a snail leaving traces in the room with my movements, so I experimented with the shapes of my journey through space.

Later, we simplified these traces and hung the drawings on the wall. When the dancers reached one of the drawings, they could draw inspiration from these shapes to create new and interesting movements, following the abstract lines.

After a short break, we set up the projector and danced to the projected live drawings. It was crucial for the artist to feel empathy toward the dancer, because a small movement of the hand made a huge impact on the dancer. Since the drawing was magnified, the visual input for the dancers was immense, but we had a lot of fun. The artist also needed to focus deeply on the drawing; at least for me, it was quite difficult to focus on my dance partner and create a nice drawing at the same time.

To conclude the workshop, we projected our happy memories onto the wall, and the group had the opportunity to dance these situations without knowing the details of each memory, relying only on what they interpreted from the pictures. The drawings featured scenes like relaxing on a hill, skydiving from a mountain, or chilling in a folk dance ball. All the memories were fun to recreate and released a lot of positive energy. After we had danced our hearts out, we discussed what the actual memories were.