Tiny OyoUnity @ ZK/U | John Lee – Breaking Poetics and Aesthetics

Tiny Oyounity presents:

“Breaking Poetics and Aesthetics” by John Lee

From late August to mid-October, our Tiny House travels through Berlin districts, engaging interactively with the local community and partners at cultural venues and institutions. Through a diverse range of workshops, the aim is to connect decolonial knowledge and artistic practices with marketing, design, and knowledge dissemination.

Third stop: ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin)

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Breaking aka b-boying and b-girling is an urban dance form originated from the Bronx, New York in the 1970s. Though its legacy runs half a century, its popular representation does not reflect the richness of the knowledge and spirit within the art form. Breaking, to quote Joseph Schloss, “is a profoundly spiritual discipline, as much as a martial art as a dance, as much a vehicle for self-realization as a series of movements.” One of the reasons that “the internal discourse of b-boying has been overlooked is that most academic hip-hop scholarship still operates within the framework of literary analysis and cultural studies. (Foundation, 2009) 

"Breaking Poetics and Aesthetics" is a hybrid workshop where participants are invited to dance and write about the movement of themselves and each other. By focusing on the foundation moves and sharing writings anonymously with each other, the workshop seeks to designate the essence of the art form as an intersubjective phenomena. At the end of the workshop, participants will have actively contributed to the embodied theorization of breaking with the ideas and feelings set in motion by the physical movement as well as the words to describe or instruct them.

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Tickets: Free admission! | Registration here

Location: ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin)

Language: English

Do you need a translation for the event? Are you in need of a companion that is also joining? Do you need a sign language interpreter? Or are you joining with a wheelchair? Then please get in touch with us via kommunikation@oyoun.de and we will try to accommodate your needs as good as we can.

Biography

Lee was born in the US, but grew up in South Korea. He moved to the US in 2002 and lived there until relocating to Berlin in 2018.

At the core of Lee’s practice is dance, drawing, reading and writing. His training in dance, particularly Breaking, informs his use of feet and floor to perform embodied drawings and writings. Prompted by his ambivalent experience of learning English as a second language, his artistic inquiry in relation to language led to an absorption in the theory of the origin of dance, drawing, and writing arising from the bodily experience of the world, hence in the bodily relations between them.

Lee embraces the exposure to languages at the edge of our conscious understanding, such as critical theory, as a transcendental experience. Inspired by the theory of revolution in one’s every day, Lee organizes reading groups. In addition to critical theory, his research involves comparative history between the East and West, as well as North and South Korea.

Lee’s works have been shown in various galleries and institutions in Berlin, Leipzig, and New York. Lee received BFA at Alfred University, NY and MFA at Parsons The New School for Design, NY.

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The project Tiny OyoUnity is part of the initiative DRAUSSENSTADT funded by the Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis and the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaflichen Zusammenhalt.

Accessibility:

Oyoun is constantly working to make access to all events offered in the building as barrier-free as possible. For individual information on accessibility, please send us an email to access(at)oyoun.de. We will get back to you as soon as possible. More info on this topic here.

Awareness:

At Oyoun there is no place for sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, any form of racism or discrimination such as anti-Black, anti-Muslim racism or antisemitism. The same applies to any kind of violent, aggressive or assaultive behaviour. Oyoun provides an open forum for dialogue and a place where we support and stand up for each other. If someone or something bothers you during an event, please contact a member of our staff who is there to help you! If you would like to share an experience with us after an event, please email us or send us an anonymous message through our website.