Type: Workshop Proposal · Heritage / Artistic Practice
Status: Available for booking
Context: Dance archives, heritage projects, artistic education and training
Role: Workshop Leader · Artist · Methodological Mentor
Look at the archives. Find what moves you in it. Create.
This workshop begins with an encounter with dance heritage. Archival photographs, documents, costumes, gestures and other visual traces are approached not only as historical evidence, but as material for observation and artistic inquiry.
Participants look for elements that can be understood through dance: posture, gesture, rhythm, space, relationship, atmosphere, or movement quality. These observations can then become impulses for their own movement vocabulary and creative work.
“Your Voice” has two related meanings. It can mean finding words for what one sees, experiences and wants to communicate. It can also mean finding a movement vocabulary through which personal concerns can be expressed.
The workshop therefore moves between seeing, articulating, moving and creating. Historical material is not reproduced as an answer; it becomes a starting point for contemporary work.
Drawing on Ricardo Viviani’s experience as a choreographer, educator and Oral Historian, the workshop combines artistic practice with archival observation. Exercises, discussion, feedback and creative assignments allow participants to test what they discover through the body as well as through language.
The format can be adapted to universities, dance schools, artistic training programmes, archives, museums and heritage projects. It may be developed around a particular collection, local history or thematic archive.
Archival Material:
Workshop proposal; related visual-history material; examples from Euphorie und Aufbruch; selected archival images and documents used as artistic impulses.
Post Scriptum — 30 August 2026
This proposal develops from the experience of Finding Your Own Voice within the Euphorie und Aufbruch project, where archival material was used as an impulse for observation and contemporary choreographic work.
Contribution / Ertrag:
The workshop brings archival observation into direct contact with artistic practice. Participants work with historical material as a source for visual and embodied inquiry and develop their own movement and verbal vocabularies in response.
Assessment / Relevanz:
The proposal is relevant to forms of heritage work that seek to move beyond preservation and interpretation toward active artistic engagement. Its particular focus is the relationship between visual observation, embodied understanding, verbal articulation and contemporary creation.
Keywords:
Dance Heritage; Archival Activation; Visual Analysis; Embodied Knowledge; Movement Vocabulary; Artistic Research; Composition; Communication; Dance Education; Visual Culture; Contemporary Creation
External Links
Euphorie und Aufbruch — Project Information
Euphorie und Aufbruch — Timeline
Internal Links
Finding Your Own Voice — WS 2020/21
Euphorie und Aufbruch — A History of Dance 1959–1969
Archival Note: This page forms part of an ongoing personal archive documenting Ricardo Viviani’s professional work and activities over more than four decades. Names and other personal information appear where relevant to the documented work or collaboration. If you believe that information concerning you has been published incorrectly or should be reconsidered, please contact me.