Performance Project: BRUJX (DAN4362.01)

luciana achugar, MFA Teaching Fellow

In this course we will make a dance, directed by achugar, and perform it at the end of the semester. It is for students with a deep awareness of their bodies in movement and with prior experience performing onstage and being part of a creative dance process, that are interested in being challenged as performers with a rigorous rehearsal process.

This work will further explore the relationships between labor and dance; effort and pleasure; repetition and ritual; and ultimately body-magic and the space of no time-time that have long informed achugar’s body of work. 

During the class we will learn dance material from achugar, and we will also explore through play and improvisation to create as a group. We will also engage in achugar’s practice of being in pleasure as a way to connect to a more liberated, empowered and “uncivilized” state. Students are expected to be open to touch and being touched, and we will work together to create an environment to feel safe to do so. 

There is within the ideology of this class, and achugar’s work, the proposition that the making of a dance is not a creation of a commodity to be delivered to an audience as a consumer. Thus, the work is created as a way to grow ourselves a magical, utopian, empowered, liberated body; a process as a way of healing and becoming that is shared with the audience as a ritual and a celebration of this healing and becoming new. We will become our “Brujx” selves! (In Spanish: witches of any or all genders). 

It is important to note that this process entails physical rigor and hard work, yet, it is not about abusing the body; it is to find liberation through the rigor by continuing to listen to our bodies’ needs and cues, to reach new states of being.


Learning Outcomes:
* To get stronger and feel more empowered in your body and its connections.
* To feel a greater connection to the ground and to others.
* To grow as a dancer by challenging yourself in new ways during the process.
* To grow as a performer and to gain more experience in front of an audience.
* To learn about and be exposed to a particular style of creative process.
* To explore the edges of your experience and to become empowered by feeling your own physical capacity grow as well as your capacity to be part of a group.
* Learning to trust your instincts and discern between what is fear and what is pleasure in your body.
* Learning to be rigorous, engaged and committed in a process.
* Expanding your capacities for performance.


Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites: To enroll in this course you must email achugar (lucianaachugar@bennington.edu) about your interest in participating and attend an audition/interview. luciana achugar and the student's advisor will have to sign off the approval and achugar is responsible for the registration.
Corequisites: Dance or Drama lab assignment if students sign up for 4 or more credits in designated dance courses.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 2
W/F 4:10PM-6:00PM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 10
Course Frequency: One time only

Categories: 4000 , All courses , Dance , Fully In-Person , Two Credit
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