Dangerous Mouses is a platform shaped to respond to the needs of a sustained physical praxis in the form of class/training/practice, initiated in 2011 by performers/choreographers Maria Mavridou and Pablo Fontdevila, further joined by Yurie Umamoto and Astarti Athanasiadou in 2014, and Stefania Petroula in 2016.

DM aims to provide an unexpected space for thinking and/as doing, playfully stimulate corporeal processes, facilitate dialogue between bodies and feed desire to move, perform and create.

The training is based on continuous flow addressing release principles, strength, coordination, cardiovascular condition, spatial awareness, balance and concentration. Simple movement patterns are introduced as a warm up to loosen up the joints into progression of movement in the space (walking/running). There is an ongoing encouragement to activate both focal and peripheral vision while working on spatial awareness and the relation to gravity through release and softening. All that is to further be practiced in the form of short movement patterns repeated traveling across the room, gradually increasing complexity and intensity in terms of condition, co-ordination and awareness. The proposal is an ongoing challenge based on working through release, rebound and soft joints within a very energetic, playful and active practice. The participants follow at their own pace while the repetition emphasises qualities and sensations over the form of the movement. Each participant investigates the application of the DM proposal on their own body. Slow patterns that focus on deep articulation of smaller joints as well as exercises in couples or manipulations are given for cooling down. DM puts forward all that throughout a radical practice of concentration and self-observation.

The participants take responsibility for their own work in physical continuum of at least 2 hours. DM proposes the challenge of not taking one’s own body for granted and aims for attention throughout the physical overload of such intensive practice. The aimed intensity stimulates the development of condition, strength, flexibility, coordination and concentration and also proposes a conjunction of exhaustion and awareness that helps the body revisit habitual through interfering patterns of movement and thought.

The DM platform runs in Amsterdam on regular basis as well as occasionally in other countries for daily trainings or workshops.

Contact one of us to share with you the upcoming trainings.

My Paradise was developed by Astarti Athanasiadou and Achilleas Chariskos in 2013 as a performance exploring the performativity of constructive tendencies within social relationships. The work departs from the gesture of offering help — a gesture that can conceal dynamics of self-importance, limitation, and control. Through problem-solving tasks, role exchange, and relational negotiation between bodies and objects, the practice investigates the ambiguous notion of liberation as a constantly shifting and negotiated condition.

As a workshop, My Paradise opens this choreographic research to wider groups of participants. Through collaborative exercises, improvisation games, and score-based exploration, participants are invited to engage in a corporeal dialogue shaped by strategy, attention, and shared decision-making. The process emphasizes relational dynamics, conflict negotiation, and the emergence of collective composition through physical interaction.

Opening this practice to diverse bodies revealed the richness of group dynamics and the unpredictable ways in which relational patterns unfold. The workshop format highlights how choreographic thinking can function as a social and perceptual tool, fostering awareness of how we support, influence, and limit one another through embodied action.

I facilitated the workshop Devising Games; strategy for Unconscious Making, as part of the Grased week 2020 in Master of Theater Practices in Artez, Arnhem, NL. The workshop focused on devising games as a means for participation and unconscious creativity. Unlike performing, playing a game strategises a different mode of participation as a lived experience. This workshop attended to the spontaneity of playing games and considers devising games as an artistic method for exciting unpredictability and interaction. Considering what Jacques Rancière calls ‘genuine participation’ as the invention of an ‘unpredictable subject’ who momentarily occupies the street, the factory, or the museum–rather than a fixed space of allocated participation whose counterpower is dependent on the dominant order, the workshop aimed to provide space and look into how subjects are engaged, involved, socially implicated, exchanged in terms of knowledge and negotiated while actively participating in the productive time of cultural capital under the form of games. Eventually, we–we as a shared agency of potentially unpredictable subjectivity, a constantly shifting collectivity of undefined bodies– can ask: How and where can we position a creative practice of devising and playing games as a different modality of artistic production? 

Break Ground (workshop) was given in September 2018 in Artez to kickoff the Master Theatre Practices trajectory by offering a playful ground to get to know each other's bodies and practices. We played, sweated, found each other's bodies, blended ideas and started all over again!