In.Placement lead by Jan Langedijk - The Netherlands (May 2002)

Organisers: Toaca Studio and Moving Academy for Performing Arts Amsterdam

Theatre workshop coordinated by the Dutch actor/ director JAN LANGEDIJK

The workshop addresses itself to actors and dancers, taking stage movement, dance and mime techniques, as well as the technique of the gag, as its points of departure for theatrical expression. The workshop takes its cue from Martin Heidegger’s text Building, Dwelling, Thinking, trying to answer the questions: How do we conquer a space? How do we inhabit it? How do we think within a space?
Jan Langedijk is one of the most interesting and provocative actors/ directors in The Netherlands. He teaches at the Mime Department, in the Theatre Academy of Amsterdam, in the tradition of Etienne Decroux. In 1989, he was awarded the Dutch Mime Award. In 1993 he founded the theatre company DeDaders, which gained international recognition with shows like: Sela, Sur place, Dikwijls, Flus.
He toured and he gave a series of workshops in Russia, Georgia, South Africa, France, Czech Republic, Germany and The Netherlands.
Since 1986 he directed and performed in more than fifteen shows.

“In.Placement is based on very abstract narratives, but in the same time it is very clear thanks to the concrete actions taking place on stage. I am interested in motivations and giving form to motivations in a physical way. In the end, physical actions become behavioral. I always call it dramatic movement as the opposite of lyrical movement or emotional performing. It’s about the drama inside the movement itself. The space can be a projection of the internal experience and in theatre you have to build a space around you out of this illusion.”
Jan Langedijk

On the ‘Corporeal Mind’ and a Heidegger Text.
The two-week workshop organised by the Toaca Cultural Foundation with MAPA Amsterdam and coordinated by the Dutch professor Jan Langedijk resulted in two shows entitled “In.Placement”. It was the first time that the Dutch director used text as a point of departure for his work — in this case a fragment from Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”. The aim of Langedijk’s training is to prove that theatrical space can be conquered, thought and inhabited by the ‘corporeal mind’, that the body creates its own architecture of concrete and abstract movements and, finally, that once on stage the body thinks. Langedijk’s practice questions the ways in which the bodily self becomes connected to its physical surroundings, emphasising either the realtion between the human being and the inanimate or the distance separating them. “How far can we think outside our bodies?” — the worshop investigated this question by resorting to both harmonic and disharmonic movement. “Space can be a projection of one’s internal experience”, says Langedijk, “and in theatre one has to build a space around oneself, based on that particular illusion.”
Cristina RUSIECKI, The Cultural Observatory