The Berlin Flâneur: Translating Movement into Writing

About

Flaneurs, or ‘city-walkers’, immerse themselves in the personalities, built environment, and atmospheres of the street. This interdisciplinary workshop innovatively combines movement experimentation in the German capital with the forum of writing.

Honoré de Balzac called flânerie the ‘gastronomy of the eye’. But more than the eye is at work here: the whole body moves through the cityscape, translating the diversity and politics of the street into thoughts, and then words. The workshop is co-taught by a professional dance|theatre artist, Nicole Nigro, and a professional non-fiction writer, Joseph Pearson. Together, they work at an intersection: how movement through the city can translate into polished writing in the genre of literary non-fiction. The workshop innovatively combines movement experimentation in the German capital with the forum of the writing workshop.

Keen city observers will move through Berlin drawing on the work of the situationists, whose focus on the spectacle emphasises how the city can actively transform its explorers. Participants will spend most of their time walking the city, feasting on its neighbourhoods, while completing a series of movement experiments based on situationist theories of la dérive, and keeping a flâneur diary of their findings. Simple choreographic devices are explored while employing Rudolf Laban’s efforts to shape our experiences: gliding, pressing, wringing, punching, floating, slashing, flicking, and dabbing through the architecture. Each participant gauges how discreet or extreme their efforts will be.

Excursions into the city––both as a group and self-directed–– reflect on cultural history, with additional readings from Berlin-explorers such as Christopher Isherwood and Audre Lorde. Like these writers, we respond to the built environment with our own compelling observations. As part of the revision process of their diaries, participants will spend one day in a formal writing workshop. Our prose--reflections on the cultural history of the city through the urbanscape--can be forms as various as the essay, diary writing, place-based fictional narrative, or docu-fiction. The intimate movement explorations, and experiments, in the German capital distill ultimately as polished creative written work.

Schedule

Day One: 10am – 4pm

Morning 10am-1pm:
Introduction to the course and to one another. Introduction to the city of Berlin, its past and present.
Afternoon 2pm-4pm: We examine examples of flâneur writing set in Berlin: Tucholsky, Isherwood, Lorde.

Day Two: 10am – 3pm

Morning 10am – 12pm: In-class movement portion.
Afternoon 1pm-3pm: First excursion in the city, exploring through movement exercises and experiments.

Day Three: 10am – 3pm

Morning 10am – 12pm: In-class movement portion.
Afternoon 1pm-3pm: Second excursion in the city, exploring through movement exercises and experiments.

Day Four: self-guided day

Participants spend the day walking on their own and writing about the city, with prompts provided by the instructors if needed.
They submit their drafts by 8pm to a group email so that we can read the drafts and make notes for the next day.

Day Five: 10am – 3pm

Morning 10am – 12pm: We spend the morning workshopping and exchanging comments on each other’s work.
Afternoon 1pm-2pm: We spend the afternoon workshopping and exchanging comments on each other’s work.
Late afternoon (no class): Is free for revision. Students are asked to polish their work, aiming for publication standard, for presentation the next day. They email their final work by midnight.

Day Six: 10am––12pm

Morning: The anthology of our work is published. We reflect on moving through Berlin, the writing process, our dynamic as a group, the market and publication possibilities, and what happened to us in Berlin. Students are encouraged to spend the weekend in Berlin, exploring the city, and writing more!

Course leader

Nicole Nigro and Joseph Pearson

Target group

This movement and writing workshop is open to everyone – regardless of native language or level of writing or theatre/dance experience – because we all have a story to tell.

Fee info