Draft:David Zambrano

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David Zambrano (born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela, full name Jesus David Zambrano Camacho) is a dance artist working with improvisation through performing, teaching and choreographing contemporary dance..

Biography

David Zambrano was born in Caracas, Venezuela, a country where dance is central in the culture. His older sister transmitted him the joy of moving when he was six years old, teaching him some steps of couple dancing and bringing him to party. He began dancing to pop music in the local discos and dance halls and was inspired by figures such as Tina Turner, Mickaël Jackson and James Brown. After completing his military highschool, Zambrano started studying computer sciences but was not convinced with this path and decided to devote himself to dance at the age of 21. He moved to the United States to study dance at the Southern Illinois University. There, he started teaching, performing, and researching his own path .

After graduating, he moved to New York in 1984. It is there that he was for the first time identified as an improviser . He was also a member of Pooh Kaye/Eccentric Motions for two years (1985-1986). He studied with Simone Forti and Joan Skinner and from 1986 he was during six years a member of the Simone Forti Troup with four other dance artists Lauri Nagel, K.J. Holmes, David Rosenmiller, Eric Schoeffer . He has frequently referred to Simone Forti as his mentor. In New York, Zambrano was improvising each week on stage, alone or with another artist like Jennifer Monson, Jacky Shue, Yvonne Meier, Sasha Waltz, Ismael Houston-Jones in different places such as PS 122, La Roulette, The Knitting Factory, Judson Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Marks Church, The Kitchen and many others ...

While still living in New York, David Zambrano used to go back to Venezuela once a year and created the Festival de Danza Postmoderna in 1989, combining performances and workshops. The invited artists would teach and perform during the festival. In the first year, the event hosted 15 participants and was not supported by the institutions but in the last edition in 1993 it gathered more than 500 students and was hosted in 5 different cities and supported by the Venezuelan Council for the Arts, Dance Theater Workshop's Suitcase Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation .

From 1987, Zambrano started to travel all around the world, in Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan... In 1998, the short film Barcelona in 48 Hours, directed by the photographer Anja Hitzenberger and by the composer Edward Ratliff was shot, following Zambrano during two days throughout his daily routine . At this time, David Zambrano was based between New York and Barcelona, coming more and more to Europe to teach and give workshops .

After 15 years in New York, Zambrano moved to Europe and found a base in Amsterdam in 1998 with his partner Mat Voorter who is also a dancer and costume designer. There, he organized in 1999 David Zambrano Invites . Each month, he invited two dance artists and two musicians to perform with him 30 minutes of total free improvisation before conversing together without preparation for another 30 minutes. Meg Stuart, Mark Tompkins, Frans Poelstra, Thomas Hauert, Hisako Horikawa, Osmani Tellez, John Jaspere, Akram Khan, Ko Morobushi, Osmany Tellez, Jennifer Monson, Palle Dyrval, and Simone Forti were some of the selected choreographers taking part in the project .

For more than thirty years, Zambrano kept travelling in more than 80 countries, teaching and performing. After moving around so much, he started to think about creating his own place somewhere in the world to keep sharing his work. By chance, at the same period, a friend told him and his partner about an old printing factory that was available to rent in Brussels. It is there that, in 2018, him and Mat Voorter founded Tictac Art Centre, where they organise workshops, performances, residencies and exhibitions since then .

Every ten years, David Zambrano organises a special event to celebrate his birthday through art and creation.

In 1999, "David Zambrano invites..." happened in Amsterdam for his 40th birthday.

In 2010, he celebrated his 50 years birthday with 50 days painting, 50 minutes performing improvisation, he toured in 50 villages around the world and he organised a 50 days workshop of flying low and passing through in Costa Rica with 50 selected participants from all around the world .

In 2019, as he was turning 60, he gathered 60 dancers for a 60 days of improvisation workshop in Tictac. The film artist Henry Hills made a short film about that experience, called Social Skills . The same year, the piece AGE was created with half of the participants.

Throughout his career, David Zambrano has received many grants, awards and fellowships in the United-States of America including the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Suitcase Fund administered by Dance Theater Workshop with funds by the Rockefeller Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Choreographer Fellowship, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation ...

Pedagogy

David Zambrano has been teaching from the very beginning of his career and he has shared his work in more than 80 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and in the Americas . He teaches Flying Low and Passing through, two contemporary dance methods he created, but also improvisation. His creations, performances and pedagogy are strongly interconnected and have developed and nourished each other . He was teaching in different dance schools like P.A.R.TS (Belgium) , La Manufacture (Switzerland) , Art Factory (Italy) , The School for New Dance Development (Holland) and he gives workshops all over the world in prestigious festivals, theaters and companies such as Impultstanz (Austria) , Movement Research (New York), American Dance Festival (USA and Japan), La Caldera (Spain), New York Dance Intensive (USA), AREA (Spain), Sasha Waltz (Berlin), Rosas (Brussels), Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekeybus (Brussels) , Cullbert Ballet (Sweden), Taller de Danza Contemporeana de Caracas (Venezuela), Danza Combinatoria (Cuba), La Anomia Imperial (Spain), Dansens Hus (Denmark), Retazos (Cuba), Espacio Alterno (Venezuela), Deltebre Dance Spain), Atlas Dance Festival (Mexico), among others.

Flying Low is a way of moving in and out of the ground more efficiently using simple movement patterns that involve breathing, speed and the release of energy throughout the body . Zambrano started developing Flying low because of a physical injury in 1982 . As he could not use his feet for six months, he decided to keep dancing horizontally, rolling from side to side, gradually developing movements and frases . In New York, his dance-mates saw him practicing and told him it was like if he was flying low . From there on, he started giving flying low workshops and since then, this practice has been hugely influencing the dance world and has been transmitted through other people in different countries. Flying low has also evolved through the years, getting influenced and inspired by other techniques such as Alexander and Skinner Releasing .

Passing Through is an instant group composition method consisting of a group of dancers being interconnected between each other and with their environment, constantly switching between leading and following, creating a spontaneous choreography . The dance studio is the limitation and inside that limitation, the dancers travel through the room in infinite possible pathways in curve. It was initially called Danceweb and became Passing Through in 1998 . This technique was inspired by the "Scramble game" of Simone Forti and focuses on the social aspect of dance with the aim of always passing between two people . The parameters, tools and rules are shared by everybody in order to play the game together as part of a big group of people . Dancers are dissolving, spiralling and passing through the space and each other, going under, over and around, connecting the walls to the floor and bodies to other bodies. They exercice the practice of infinity possibilities of moving together inside a defined time-space environment .

David Zambrano has been practicing, sharing and teaching improvisation through Flying low and Passing through but also with other workshops like Soul Project or Couple Dancing. For him, improvisation is a way to express one's full life experience, using personal everyday life and learning from it . Some of the main principles of his improvisation approach are to be present in the whole body, being ready for the unexpected and in case of an emergency, becoming a media of life and communication, experiencing the "now" . He distinguishes the concept of papa-head to describe a rational vision of the body being controled by the brain and the notion of mama-earth to talk about the interconnectivity bewteen the whole body and its environment .

Soul Project is another regular workshop of David Zambrano. It focuses on sharing the tools and movement qualities that have been developed in the creation of the piece called Soul Project. The piece premiered in 2006 with Edivaldo Ernesto, Nina Fajdiga, Carlos Garbin, Milan Herich, Peter Jasko, Horacio Macuacua, Eugenie Rebetez, Hermis Malkotsis, Matthieu Perpoint, Eleanor Bauer, Sue Yeon Yeon, Young Cool Park and David Zambrano with costumes from Mat Voorter . It toured during 10 years in many different countries and received a very enthusiastic critic from prestigious newspapers such as the New York Times and the New Yorker . Soul Project was born from a desire of Zambrano to create an "egocentric choreography" where the dancer takes a center at any moment, and the public moves through the room to where the dancer is. The dance artists dance spontaneous intimate and powerful solos on soul music .

Couple Dancing is also an important part of Zambrano's work. It started in 1995-1996 when he led a research for a piece about couple dancing called Ballroom with a group of five dancers. Since then, he keeps sharing this practice focusing on the eloquent movements of the hands and the balance between leading and following .

Tictac Art Centre

David Zambrano arrived in Brussels to teach in schools, dance companies and give workshops. As he had been travelling non-stop around the world for over 30 years, he started to think about opening his own studio to have a place to welcome and gather dancers and keep performing and teaching. He decided to settle in somewhere to develop this project and take a ten years break from travelling. With his partner Mat Voorter, he heard about an old printing company to rent in the area of Anderlecht in Brussels with a big room where they could build a 300m2 studio. After six months of renovation, it opened in 2018 under the name of Tictac Art Centre, an independant place for performing and visual arts .

Tictac is open the whole year with workshops and performances every week, an open stage called Crude Saturday twice a month, exhibitions and residencies for performers and visual artists. David Zambrano uses this place to share his work with two intensives 4 weeks workshops per year (one of Flying Low/Passing Through and one of Improvisation for Performers), perform, paint, draw and make clothes . In 2024, he invited 24 artists, including himself, to take part in Silo Solo Solamente 2 (SSS2), giving them the opportunity to research for one week in the small studio, alone with no music, no costume, no props and to perform on the last day of the residency. This project follows Silo Solo Solamente (SSS) that happened during Covid in 2020, when 30 artists and David Zambrano performed spontaneous solos in Tictac

Choreographies & Performances

David Zambrano's work has been presented in many places such as Charleroi Danse (Belgium), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Fringe Arts Festival (USA), Spring Dance Festival (Ireland), June Events (France), Festival Deltebre (Spain), Tanzwerkstatt Berlin (Germany), Tamperen International Theater Festival (Finland), Improvisation Festival/New York (USA), Primer Taller Internacional de Danza (Cuba), Periferics (Spain), P.S. 122 (USA), CODA (Norway), Impulstanz Festival (Austria), Konfrontance (Czech Republic), Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church (USA), the Whitney Museum (USA), Theater Frascati (Netherlands), Atlas Dance Festival (Mexico) and many others. He has also been sharing a lot of untitled and spontaneous performances.

1984 : Para Carmen

1986 : No Basta Rezar

1986 : Tap the Feet

1986 : Volando Voy

1986 : Apretaditos

1987 : Fetiche

1988 : Hecho en Venezuela

1988 : Rifle

1989 : Undertow

1990 : Sabana

1990 : Segunda Puerta

1990 : Celestina

1990 : Los que se Fueron

1991 : Bolinga

1992 : Desde el Valle

1992 : Tra-ka-ta

1993 : Agua Fuerte

1993 : Cancion de Diente

1993 : La Vie en Rose

1993, 1994, 1995 : Click-Klick series

1994 : Proyecto: Z

1994 : Red Blink

1995 : Frosting

1996 : Ballroom

1997 : Aux.muted

1997 : The Twist Story

1999 : Acme

2000 : David Zambrano Invites...

2002 : Mandraking

2003 : The Rabbit project / Proyecto Conejo

2005 : Twelve flies went out at noon

2006 : Soul Project

2009 : Shock

2009 : Holes

2011 : Zeta

2011 : My Fire Is Still Burning For You

2012 : Why Not !

2013 : Tierras Enamoradas / Lands in love

2015 : Sal-to

2015 : A Song For two Humans

2019 : AGE

2020 : SSS

2020 : Sushi 20

2024 : SSS2