In this workshop participants will explore essential elements like strength, alignment, balance and mobility that are required for understanding the basics of handstands. We will practice exercises on the wall, incorporate circuits and explore various handstand entries within the context of music and pacing.

This will be a creatively engaged workshop with simple, fun structures to bring into your own practice.

Learn how to practice the two person, 5 ball giant windmill, one of the most beautiful and satisfying passing patterns in balls (also possible with other props). This workshop covers all the foundations for learning good technique and body mechanics for a clean 5 ball windmill.

Build a good contact juggling practice by deepening your awareness of your body and balance with one ball. This workshop will focus on basics of ball contact – rolling, stalling, isolation – and is open to be steered by the interests and wishes of the students.

Connect with others while improvising with balls (and other props). An intuitive system for freestyle partner juggling. This workshop helps us move away from fixed passing patterns and find playful ways of exploring the space between our bodies and our juggling objects.

3 hour masterclass

Reality is the source from which all people who dedicate themselves to creation drink, in one way or another. Some draw on it to generate fiction, others to sew a documentary, and some move between the two disciplines. But reality is not just an inspiration, it is here for us to intervene in and it is something we can lean on and which can support our creation of a story, a performance or a show.

We understand the performance space as being beyond what happens on a stage; To find the right stage for a story, you have to open yourself up and look at the world. Walk through it, and let it open the multifaceted doors it contains to you. This workshop is practical in nature. It will consist of exercises of observation, writing and intervention all connecting reality and space, using the tools of dramaturgy and performance in public space to see what reality offers us and exploring different spaces and their dramatic possibilities.

Focus on fine-tuning and precision in static poses, counterbalancing, and building towers.

Explore dynamic collective acrobatics, working on energy generation and timing synchronization for fluid movements, including elements of banquine, touche throws, and falling and catching.

In this workshop we will journey into the practice of the Flow Arts through the elements of timing and direction.

Working with body and props we will work from very basic foundations and show how from a simple basis we can progress to infinite complexity, and at any level find a beautiful flow.

These skills serve as the basis for the journey into fire, LED and flow arts play and performance.

During the workshop we will also explore Learning to Learn techniques to arm ourselves with the tools to learn any skill faster, alongside movement exercises to free our bodies movement possibilities. The workshop will use poi as the primary prop to demonstrate and explore but is applicable to all props that can be spun in a circle (staff, clubs, fans, buugeng, hoops, etc)

Lali Àlvarez
60 minutes

After 10 years of developing participatory projects I realize that it is a field in which a lot remains to be done, to think, to define and to write. But there are a series of principles, we could almost call them philosophical or ethical principles, that run through our work when, as artists, we work beyond our studio, when our practices go beyond our individual desire (or our need) to express ourselves, to commit ourselves, to search for beauty or to influence the culture and society that is contemporary to us.

Two years ago I started working as a mentor at BetaCircus European project. My previous contact with the circus world was limited to the fact that I have always been a voracious spectator and the creation of a show that I directed for a non-conventional space in which some circus professionals participated and which premiered at Fira Tárrega in 2018. I was also familiar with the project of La Central del Circ in Barcelona, which offers mediation to resident artists to develop community work, but I had never considered how the processes I develop to create participatory community and territorial projects could be part of the creation of a circus show. For me it was very difficult to imagine how people who do not have the physical training and skills required for circus could be part of a participatory process of creation. How would we go about turning non-professional participants into subjects of the artistic act?

After this experience I have learned that not having expertise in a field can allow you to be more permeable to what that field has to offer because you are not determined by your own formulas.

And I’ve understood that it’s not our discipline that matters, but our principles when working. I have understood that creative processes are always tied, in a certain way, to a certain community and a certain territory. Even if your project is not centred on this.
And now, I have some thoughts and questions to share. Will you join me?”