Workshop with Emily Mast, September 2023

Workshop with artist
Emily Mast

Image: Emily Mast.

LA-based artist Emily Mast is offering a free, intensive 8 day experimental movement & voice workshop at Betonsalon art center that explores the complementary roles of personal autonomy and interrelationality through conscious and collective production in precarious times.

As a group, we will engage in exercises that involve physical movement, vocalization, theatrical play, free writing, hypnosis, tantra, dom/sub dynamics, and durational improvisation. Together, we will build a series of consent and boundary frameworks that probe collective thresholds and engage the subconscious, mining it as a tool for creation and transformation.

Workshops will begin with exercises in building intrapsychic and interpersonal trust among participants. We will cultivate a practice of courage and care, learn how to be vulnerable with one another, and develop our expressive vocabulary as a group.

We will share our process with outside eyes during two public “sharing sessions” on two consecutive Saturdays – more in a gesture of humility than of performativity.

Together, we will be asking: what might be possible if we accept to work in constant relation to one another? If existence necessarily means being in relationship, and if authority is decentralized, how might we come up with working methods that can shape equitable presents and futures? And how might we build the necessary structures to manage all of the above with optimism and imagination?

In order to build an atmosphere of trust and security, participants must commit to attending each workshop session in its entirety.

Each session lasts 3 hours and will take place on the following days:

Wednesday, September 27 from 19h-22h
Thursday, September 28 from 19h-22h
Friday September 29 from 19h-22h
Saturday September 30 from 15h-17h: Sharing Session

Wednesday October 4 from 19h-22h
Thursday October 5 from 19h-22h
Friday October 6 from 19h-22h
Saturday October 7 from 15h-17h: Sharing Session

People of all ages, backgrounds, and physical abilities are encouraged to apply. A willingness to collaborate is imperative to this process as it openly demands an abandonment of the ego in favor of collective identity. Participants must be curious and open to experimenting with their body, their voice, and their subconscious. All workshops will be conducted in French. No prior performance experience necessary.

The workshop is fully booked.

BIOGRAPHY
Emily Mast is a Los Angeles-based visual and performing artist. She combines visual art, theater and dance to produce multi-compositional projects that employ live performance, installation and activism. For the past few years her practice has focused on power dynamics and subverting seemingly immoveable hierarchies. Mast is particularly interested in how artistic imagination can be used to reimagine the world at a time when value, equality and the concept of freedom are demanding radical reconsideration.

Mast has staged “choreographed exhibitions” and presented live performances internationally at venues such as the Villa Medici, Rome; Picasso Museum, Barcelona; Theatre des Champs Elysées, Paris; Fondation LUMA, Arles; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; La Ferme du Buisson, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum and REDCAT, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.