Photo: Shai Levy
paul
PAUL is the Performing Artists’ Urban Laboratory, a collective for artists by artists with a strong focus on the performing arts. PAUL is a place for artistic exchange, a place for collaboration, and a place for community. PAUL is the conglomeration of Vera, Zahra, Jojo, and Edegar who support one another in their work and shape this platform together. PAUL is collectively run, without hierarchies. Together we strive for the same concepts and goals.
Rather than delve into facts of our long lives we've chosen to describe ourselves personally, talk about our work, our art and what inspires us. Enjoy!
THE PAUL KOLLEKTIV
VERA FENYVESI KÖPPERN
Dance/Performance/Yoga
*Good Morning Yoga & Good Evening Yoga
Vera is a performer, choreographer, director, and Yoga teacher. At the center of her artistic work lie improvisation and spontaneous movement. She focuses on research with/on a body that communicates intrapersonal, interpersonal and social processes through itself and trains its capacity for empathy through awareness of self and other.
"I am fascinated by the body; the anatomical body, the inseparability of body, mind and feeling, the everyday body, the dancing body, the performative body. In order to get to know this magical bunch of molecules, I work with Improvisation, Instant Composition and Spontaneous Movement. In my artistic work, I look for possibilities to create spaces in which the body, and the moment itself, may take over, speak, listen to and understand itself through itself. As a Yoga teacher, I focus on healthy alignment on both a physical and a mental level. My goal is to help my students to find an organic practice that teaches awareness and self-respect."
www.verakoeppern.com
ZAHRA BANZI
Contemporary Dance
*Move With Intention 1 & 2
Zahra is a contemporary dancer, choreographer and teaching artist. The drive behind her artistic inquiry lies in the space between physical and emotional realms.
"Aesthetically I seek to convey the beauty in the strange, the ugly, and the mundane. I am interested in honest movement. In the exploration of the felt sense and the surfaces, textures and pathways which exist within each of us. Having had music as a deep and integral part of my upbringing I find it is what grounds my work. I am drawn to the gestural relationships between sound and movement, as well as the investigation of our genetic resonance- the memories stored inside us all. I find that the recognition of these distant stories, as well as the integration of musicality can provoke lush landscapes for movement based arts."
JOJO HAMMER
Contemporary Dance & Flamenco
*Flamenco Technique, Tune In
Jojo is a dancer, choreographer and teacher of contemporary dance, flamenco and improvisation. Her artistic focus is exploring the transformational and expressive possibilities of the body, its immanent musicality and emotionality. As a teacher, she is interested in somatic work and in getting to know her own body along with its habits and automatisms.
"What fascinates me is the infinite depth and depth of the body and its expressive possibilities. There is so much knowledge, experience and joy of life in a body and it can be read like an open book of personal experiences. As a body can learn and reinvent itself, the spirit can also reinvent itself with it. A trough of endless possibilities - to make the impossible tangible and through the sharpened perception learn deeper and deeper to understand itself. Allow me to carry my organism through life.
The beauty of the body is for me in its honesty, fragile personality, and its infinite wealth of stored memories. "
EDEGAR STARKE
Dance and Physical Theatre
Edegar Starke is a dancer, actor, choreographer and teaching artist. The focus of his movement research lies on the social aspect and impact of a dialogue through an artistic vocabulary.
“I am very curious about the singularities of the body in movement, this fascinating gathering of memories, images, feelings, flesh, bones, etc., and in acknowledging this, researching a path of exercises and ways of investigating what moves you and what do you move with it."
FRIENDS WHO TEACH AT PAUL
SABINA MOE Contemporary Dance
*Failure Lab & In Depth Yoga
Sabina Moe is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and cute human. She is from a very small island and would love to talk to you about it.
”Dance is infinite. It is a strange art full of stranger worlds. My work focuses on taming the void, generating empathy, and living in joy. I believe that art, no matter where it comes from, is most satisfying when it ends in euphoria and tenderness. The world around us is there to be digested. Seeds of knowledge are all around us hoping to be harvested for our art. My work is about understanding what you have already been practicing and harnessing it to find new ideas. You are what you practice, you already have the knowledge. What you learn with me you can take with you and use everywhere.”