Workshop with Kaori ito and Amélie Madeline

Time: Monday October 19th to Friday October 23rd

Place: Figurteatret i Nordland (aka. Nordland Visual Theatre), Stamsund, Norway

For: dancers, actors and actresses, puppeteers and visual artists

Required: Professional experience in the arts and committed attendance for the full duration of the course.

Language: English

Max 11 participants

NVT covers travel expenses up to 600€ and housing in Stamsund. No workshop fee. 

Submission deadline: Sep 1, 2026.

Apply via produsent.fin@nfk.no

Application requirements:

Short motivational letter, maximum 150 words

CV

Selected applicants will be invited to the workshop. The selection will be made by NVTs artistic director together with Kaori Ito and Amélie Madeline

Course objectives:

From gesture to imprint, from material to movement: exploring a dialogue at the crossroads of dance, puppetry, and sculpture.

This workshop invites participants to explore the relationship between the body, dance, puppetry, and sculpture through a shared process of experimentation.

We will begin by revisiting the fundamentals of our respective practices: physical warm-ups for dancers and puppeteers, stage presence, the relationship with objects, spatial awareness, a willingness to take risks, and the poetics of movement, the body, and the object.

Through movement research, we will explore the body as a landscape of separate yet interconnected parts. Participants will experiment with isolating, manipulating, and articulating different parts of the body, approaching the body itself as a large-scale puppet.

The workshop will then move into a sculptural process. Participants will create casts of body parts using different mould-making techniques, including plaster bandages and alginate. From these impressions, we will produce casts in a variety of materials, each offering distinct tactile, visual, and kinetic qualities.

Moulding suspends the living body in time. Like a photograph, it captures the imprint of movement and transforms it into a still presence—a trace, a memory of living flesh.

From this transformation, we will explore the reverse process on stage: how can we breathe life back into an inanimate form? How can movement emerge where it has been suspended? How do these sculptural fragments transform the dancers' quality of movement? How can performers embody an "in-animated" body, or animate only isolated body parts?

Through this dialogue between movement and matter, participants will investigate fragmented, augmented, and de-realised bodies, rediscovering the logic of life within forms that are simultaneously human and non-human.

At the intersection of dance, puppetry, and sculpture, the workshop proposes a space for experimentation where the living body and its material double continuously influence and transform one another.

PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE

DAY 1:

Morning: Introduction + full-body warm-up exercises 

Afternoon: Workshop on taking moulds of body parts

DAY 2

Morning: Full-body warm-up + basics of manipulation (gaze, fixed point, delegation)

Afternoon: On set – putting the moulds into practice

In the workshop: producing the first prints

Day 3

Warm-up + putting the prints made the previous day into practice

In the workshop: producing prints using other materials. Applying a patina to the first proofs

Day 4 

Warm-up + putting the prints made the previous day into practice

In the workshop: working on photography and collage on selected prints

Day 5

Warm-up + putting into practice / imaginative exploration, experimenting with all or some of the elements created

KAORI ITO

From the age of five, Kaori studied classical ballet under Takagi Syuntoku in Tokyo. At eighteen years old, she launched her professional career as a dancer and choreographer and was declared by Ryouichi Enomoto to be “the best young dancer and choreographer” at the ST spot, Yokohama (1998).  At the age of twenty, she moved to New York to integrate the dance department of the Purchase College where she studied the Graham, Cunningham, Limon, and Horton techniques. After returning to Tokyo she graduated in sociology in 2003. The same year she got a grant to go back to New York as part of the Japanese Government’s Program of Overseas Studies for Artists and studied at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

Kaori Ito worked with Philippe Decouflé, Angelin Preljocaj, Alain Platel, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and James Thierrée before embarking on her own choreographic adventure in collaboration with Aurélien Bory, Olivier Martin-Salvan, and also with her own company. As a polymorphic artist she produces videos, paintings and regularly collaborates in theatre and cinema with Edouard Baer, Denis Podalydès and Alejandro Jodorowsky. In 2015, She received the SACD prize Nouveau talent chorégraphie and was named chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. From 2023, she became the director of National dramatique center in Strasbourg. She creates Waré Mono, Battle mon cœur, Moé Moé Boum Boum, Dance Marathon Express. 

AMELIE MADELINE

After qualifying in applied arts with a specialisation in sculpture, Amélie MADELINE went on to specialise in puppetry, seeking to combine her love of the performing arts with her work as a visual artist.

She trained in puppet construction with the puppet maker Petr Rezac in Prague and continued her exploration of manipulated objects by undertaking the puppeteer-actor course at the Théâtre Chès Penses Verte in Amiens, as well as a course in mechanisms and small stage machinery at the CFPTS 

In 2010, Amélie opened a shared workshop in Saint-Denis within a former industrial site, bringing together a wide variety of artistic practices and craftspeople; it was through these encounters that the collective ‘La Briche Foraine’ was founded in 2012. 

At the same time, Amélie collaborates with various artists and companies as a visual artist and puppeteer; she joined Les Anges au plafond in 2014 for the creation of the show *Rage* and has been crafting the company’s puppets ever since. She works as a puppet maker for the companies La Magouille, Le Théâtre de Romette, Le Printemps du Machiniste, Miel de Lune and Cie Espace Blanc, and also creates graphic designs and projected imagery for the Mawmaw collective.

In 2019, she co-founded the theatre company L'Arpenteuse with her sister Pauline Madeline (actress/puppeteer); their first production, *589m de mémoire(s)*, brought them together on stage. 

-At the same time, she took to the stage as a visual puppeteer in the production featuring angels on the ceiling, *Le nécessaire déséquilibre des choses*.