The "School of Disobedience" is an experimental, anti-canonical, and critical Performance+Art School where students are encouraged to raise their voice, liberate their body and mind, open themselves to new practices, forms, aesthetics, and inspirations.
​The “School of Disobedience” wants to be a new form of resistance, an anti-fast art, a collective healing garden, an ode for sincerity and courage, a passionate and radical platform for simple actions and small changes.

organization

Length:
  • Week-end or Part time or Full time
  • Flexible commitment: Students can register independently for each class
Fall / Winter classes:
  • Performance: Improvisation, Repertoire, Movement Research
  • Choreography: Inspiration, Creation, Composition
  • Creative writing: Expressive writing and literary creation in many different forms
  • Embodied Texts, Textual Choreographies: Exploring the use of Speech and Text in Dance Performance
Topics:
personal mythologies, trust, commitment, norms, dependence, relationship dynamics, identity, fear, passion, madness and unreason
Venues:
Dance studio and public spaces in Budapest (Hungary), Paris (France), Brussels (Belgium), Newcastle (UK), and Online
Number of participants: max. 10 / class
Conditions: Classes are open for ALL women regardless age, race, sexual orientation, religion, political leanings, professional and personal background... 
Participation costs:
Fee or Work-exchange (cf. each class)
Application process: here

class activities

  • PERFORMANCE: improvisation, repertoire;
  • COMPOSITION-CREATION: performance making, choreography;
  • RESEARCH-INSPIRATION: talks, readings, screenings, historical material, archives, and divers audiovisual resources;
  • CREATIVE WRITING: immersive writing experiences, creative writing and sharing;
  • COMMUNITY ART: politics of care, healing practices, rituals;
  • FIGHT CLUB: self-confidence, empowerment, courage;
  • CLEAN CLUBBING: self-liberation, motivation, resistance.

click & discover our fall/winter classes

methodology

Improvisation
Far from academic and canonic contemporary dance and improvisation classes, the School of Disobedience's performance improvisation method is rather inspired by abstract art in terms of thinking, and by photography in terms of making. It denies physical virtuosity, skillful trick, technical stratagem, aesthetic artifice, and more broadly classicism’s emphasis on imitation. Instead it stress the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors with a structure directly rooted into photographic processing:
  1. observing life;
  2. exposing to light;
  3. fixing the moment;
  4. developing the image.
During this class, following an intuitive and very personal research, you will explore how personal mythologies, memory, and identity are formed and constituted. Guided by creative instructions and tasks, you will challenge your body as a political-affective geography, a historically shaped and colonized archive, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.
Repertoire
You will learn some choreographic phrases from the Gray Box Repertoire, focusing on MÖBIUS (2021), and Right for Fight (2022), the company’s latest works. You will discover the maker's, Anna Ádám's movement vocabulary, her choreographic approach, and working method. Through short sequences explore your own strength, physicality, and creativity , focus on your feelings and intuition, place your sensations into physical form. You will also learn how to interconnect your emotions, movement qualities coming from the practice of thematic improvisation, and the given choreographic language.
MOVEMENT RESEARCH
This thematic class will invite you to step out of your comfort zone, transform your imagination and open yourself to new forms, aesthetics and inspirations. During the class you will discover different techniques and tools to generate new movements and movement qualities. So as to stimulate different parts of the brain and the body, you will move back and forth between moving, writing, and drawing. 
COMPOSITION
Stay for an additional hour to delve into composition. Using movements from the "Movement Research" class, this extra time will enable you to put together movements into phrases and sequences through creative tasks and instructions.
CREATION
Stay for an additional hour to delve into choreography. Using movement phrases from the "Composition" class, this extra class will enable you to play, tinker, craft, and put together your sequences into choreography through creative tasks and instructions.
​Following a short introduction and group discussion based on readings, life experience, self-examination, you will be invited to reflect and work as soloists, with partners, or in group to create a performance in relation with the topic of the day. You will also receive a choreographic toolbox together with one-on-one mentoring (including critical feed-back in the analysis, application of the method and the clarity of details).
FIGHT CLUB
Fight Clubs are political soft spaces of care and empowerment, where through the practice of play fighting and self-defense, we occupy the space, liberate our body and voice, discover our power and challenge our strength, develop self-confidence and resistance. Against the intimidating and objectifying male gaze used as an instrument of women’s oppression, we regularly do eye gazing exercises, and learn how to confront it instead of looking away. We reinforce our eyes as a muscle, and rehearse to gaze back proudly again, again, and again. Making our eye-muscle become stronger and stronger, we gaze back day after day with a little bit more confidence, and a little bit less of fear.
CLEAN TECHNO CLUBBING
Learn how to wake up your feel-good hormones, how to produce dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin naturally. Explore how to use the power of your body and mind to enter a conscious trance state through intensive physical dancing, how to party clean. Let's enjoy together techno clubbing without drugs and alcohol, staying sober, safe, fresh, and healthy.

philosophy

In the “School of Disobedience”, you are encouraged to produce and share knowledge and tools to imagine the framework for a new economy of performing arts, in which the focus is switched from competition, career, fame, glory, and visibility to mutualisation, cooperation, collaboration, support, and care. A new world, where you don’t have to obey other's gaze, and judgments, handle the profession's pressure, and respond to gatekeeper's and standard-bearer's expectations. Putting the body, emotions, and critical theory on the same level, this new world is constructed beyond dualisms, where you constantly look for ambiguity, nuances and different shades of grey, celebrate in-betweens, wiggle rooms, doubt, and uncertainty, welcome diversity, applaud critical and divergent thinking, celebrate disagreement, dissent, resistance, and nonconformity. You unlearn western aesthetics, academic canons, beauty norms, manners and patterns in contemporary performance art, and relearn how to dare to behave differently, create unconventionally, think outside-of-the-box.
You are given a chance to build collectively a structured "creative healing space" to connect, collaborate, learn, and create with fellow students.
A space, where you can reflect on yourself as both an individual and member of a community.
Where you can find ways to support yourself and support others.
Where you can progress, move forwards, grow.
Gain confidence and strength from friendship, trust, and togetherness.

staff

  • Unlearning facilitators:
➤ Anna Ádám ["Thinking in Images" + "Fight Club" + "Sober Techno" + "Let it Go Club / Break-up Club"]
www.instagram.com/annaadamstudio
➤ Luca Borsos ["Women's Literary Salon: Open Stage"]
www.instagram.com/lutzaa
➤ Enikő Katalin Eged ["Drawing Circle"]
www.instagram.com/azzurro_velluto
➤ Judit Kis ["Philosophy & Hammam"]
www.instagram.com/u.dyt
➤ Eva Mora @eva.mora.7 ["Dirty Dancing"]
www.instagram.com/evmogo
➤ Réka Pável @czudaru ["Women's Writing Circle"]
www.instagram.com/rekaforyou
  • Program creator:
Anna Ádám in collaboration with the company Gray Box.