All for one! OYO staff with Lucie at Greiter OYO was privileged to receive the visit in January (14 to 18) of Lucie Carmen Gregoire, dancer and choreographer from Canada. Lucie trained the OYO staff on basic contemporary dance skills and created with them a piece, All for one. She was only given the following brief from OYO’s director Philippe: ‘multiple sexual partners’. She explored the journey of youngsters, from meeting, discovering one another, flirting and changing partners. She wrote some sequences, including a challenging floor work, and created others with the staff. The result is a ten minutes long piece the staff performed at Greiter to some of Greiter’s staff and OYO’s board. ‘It was important for me as a choreographer to get the OYO staff involved in the creative process’, explained Lucie Carmen’, especially because they worked quite a bit on developing creative tools through games and exercises. Even though some sections were choreographed step by step, others took shape from people’s movement. I believe All for one is a well-balanced piece between my artistic vision and people’s learning. In spite of its short length (nine minutes and a half), its topic (multiple sexual partners) is expressed clearly through moments of pure physicality, simple presence and lively theatricality. For all those reasons, this choreography is clearly an achievement for me, and I look forward to see where OYO staff will take it. ‘ The production team then took the piece to Opuwo and taught it to the Opuwo youth group (21 to 25 January 2010). This was challenging, since teaching someone else’s piece is difficult. However, the production team did a great job. By the end of the five days, the piece was not polished, but the Opuwo youth group had enough to work on. ‘They were two important challenges in Opuwo’, said Lucie Carmen, ‘First, where to start giving feedbacks and inputs? Then, where to stop? It was quite interesting but challenging to deal with three artistic processes – Philippe’s, the production assistants’ and mine. It was like being between two slices of bread. In my usual environment I create, rehearse and give workshops according to my professional approach and my artistic esthetic so having created 'All for one' but letting OYO production assistants go through their own process was not an easy task’ ‘I think this experience was fantastic’, explained Philippe Talavera, OYO’s director. ‘It allowed the production team to learn a new way of creating material, while reminding them how important it is to understand a piece they will have to later teach. All for one will be part of our regional tours and OYO’s festival. It will therefore be an important piece for us this year. Precision and sharpness are therefore extremely important. The production team was challenged, but I have the feeling they did learn a lot from that experience.’ Opuwo youth group was privileged to continue from 26 to 29 January with a  drama workshop, under the leadership of Philippe, and thanks to financial support from Medicos del Mundo. They created an interesting drama piece on multiple concurrent sexual partners and some of the consequences cheating may have. They also took this change to polish All for one. Lucie concluded by saying ‘While observing OYO people prior to their dance training, I was struck by their energy, dedication and seriousness. From that point on, I started to look forward to digging into moving with them as I was curious to witness people’s ways of welcoming and dealing with my material (...) I gained a lot as an artist, teacher and human being. Both stages of OYO’s training generated questions, options and answers for me in my own life. Throughout the training, I had the opportunity to evaluate my own learning process, reinforce certain of my strengths, develop new teaching skills and put myself in new situations… for all those reasons I did grow up artistically and humanly’   <Previous Next>