Movement workshop with luciana achugar, New York, USA / Uruguay

27, 28, 29 May
1:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Studio, Regional Center for Contemporary Arts “Toplocentrala”, Sofia / Bulgaria

Participants: a mixed group of professionals, non-professionals, and students; choreographers, performers, actors, people who have had some experience with somatic practices; artists working in film and photography, as well as writers who do not spend much time connected to their bodies, can also benefit greatly from this experience.

To apply for a place in the workshop, please send a short CV to: dramaturgies.new@gmail.com. Deadline: 22 May 2026

THE WORKSHOP

During this workshop luciana achugar proposes Utopia as practice rather than destination; exploring the relationship between collective practices and dance as healing; healing as creative process; and process as ritual.

Using tools from various somatic healing modalities and achugar’s own Pleasure Practice, as well as what comes up from the collective. Allowing the possibility of creating from a less ego/mind place as an expression of mastery of the self and letting the collective be the creative force.

The Pleasure Practice is achugar’s own practice developed through years of making dances. The practice of being in pleasure is a practice of undoing the learned hierarchical model of embodiment that has been programmed into us and to undo the shame that comes with it to unearth a more liberated, empowered, decolonized, uncivilized self that is more connected to our instincts, our hearts, our guts, and our sex to celebrate togetherness and connection to the earth, to ourselves, and to others.

The workshop starts as an embodied somatic practice slowly and internally. It connects us with breathing, sensing, moving and sounding from an intuitive knowing that achugar’s pleasure practice’s specific language facilitates. It shifts your perception and embodied experience. It goes from a deeply internal transformative experience and awareness to a collective relational joyful and empowered experience of liberation through acceptance of what is in the room without excluding the shadows or more difficulties that may arise.

BIO

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and most recently as part of  the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015, was remounted with an all Uruguayan cast at the Festival Internacional de Danza en Uruguay this May, was presented outside as a performance/block party/urban ritual at the River to River Festival in Lower Manhattan in June 2016. She received a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography and a nomination for a BESSIE Award for Outstanding Production for her last full-evening length work An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, and most recently she received the 2017 Alpert Award for Dance and became a 2017-18 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence.

The workshop is part of luciana achugar’s artistic residency in Sofia, organized by New Dramaturgies Platform as part of the project “Dancing Feminist Kin-aesthetics” with Luciana Achugar (USA) in Sofia, Skopje & Ljubljana, realized through the GPS / Global Practice Sharing ECE Exchange Program at Movement Research (USA).