About

Andrea Rimon is an artist and educator focused on movement and culture. They began their tying and intimacy work as an extension of their graduate education in gender and sexuality and studies.

Influences

Physical Theatre

Andrea Rimon has an extensive and ever-growing engagement with physical theater practices. In addition to their academic coursework, they have taken extended courses with SITI, Movement Theater Studio, Theater Unspeakable, and with Lorin Eric Salm. For Andrea, physical theater provides an important pedagogical inspiration as well as a range of techniques for specifying and communicating movement quality. The study of twentieth century movement theater also provides an outlook on the vital interchange between Japan and Europe, a relation that has been vital to the international popularization of tying.

Jacques Lecoq

Jacques Lecoq’s approach to physical theater emphasizes facilitating actors’ own exploration and creative processes. After providing a foundational vocabulary, Lecoq’s approach turns towards giving students the community and tools they need in order to generate feedback and to assess their own work. Lecoq’s pedagogy draws heavily on mask-work, commedia dell’arte, and his previous experience with physical education.

The Suzuki Method of Actor Training & Viewpoints

As shown through the work of The SITI Company, the Suzuki Method and Viewpoints come together to form well-rounded toolset for any actor or mover. The Suzuki Method provides an accessible window on to the physical training and patterning central to traditional forms of Japanese theater and fundamental for understanding the aesthetics of tying. Viewpoints provides a means of analyzing, questioning, and moving beyond the intense patterning the Suzuki method provides.

The Mime of Marcel Marceau & Étienne Decroux

The work Marcel Marceau and Étienne Decroux share roots with both The Suzuki Method and Lecoq’s approach to theater. Marceau and Decroux, like Lecoq, were inspired by the work of Jacques Copeau, himself inspired by Noh theater. Decroux provides a means of thinking through powerfully expressive yet less representational modes of physical theater. Marceau, a student of Decroux, provides a distinct yet highly informative transformation of Decroux’s work back towards more representational work. The result is an approach that, while addressing many of the same topics, arrives and and comes from a very different base than Lecoq’s work.

The Suzuki Method of Actor Training & Viewpoints

The Mime of Marcel Marceau & Étienne Decroux

Dance

Although dance may first seem at a remove from tying and intimacy work, it provides a powerful set of techniques and vocabularies. Andrea Rimon has been training capoeira for over ten years, actively dances butoh, and is engaged in ongoing training in Laban Movement Analysis. Each of these disciplines an important component of Andrea’s holistic approach.

Laban Movement Analysis

The work of Rudolf Laban and Irmgard Bartenieff provides a robust and precise vocabulary for movement analysis. Their of focus on helping people improve their expressive range and ability to engage intentionally forms a basis for both preparation and analysis in Andrea Rimon’s work.

Capoeira

Capoeira is a diverse cultural practice. There are many ways that training capoeira for a significant part of their life has shaped Andrea Rimon’s approach to movement. Most important, however, is capoeira’s particular form of improvisatory play. A game of capoeira involves a complex negotiation of awareness, expectations, genre, appropriateness, and aggressivity. It provides a useful framework for how to attentively and ethically engage in a creative process with others and in the context of a broader community. Its emphasis on trickery and cultural awareness provides an important counterbalance to approaches based on explicit consent that often fail to take into account the complexity and embeddedness involved with even “direct, explicit communication.”

Butoh

Butoh emerged at the same time and place as tying as we know it. Butoh and tying performances happened in the same bars, had some of the same audience, and were photographed by many the same photographers. As such, butoh provides a window into some of the historical context of tying that is frequently glossed over in conservative and reactionary accounts of the art. More importantly, as an art that seeks to deconstruct and find alternatives to colonial forms of embodiment, butoh works against all-too-common approaches to tying that seek to naturalize and dehistoricize aspects of culture and identity.

Tying and Intimacy Work

Art involving movement and concerned with embodiment often involves touch and can easily start to address topics that may be fraught and difficult. Tying and intimacy direction, choreography, and coordination provide a set of tools that are vital for addressing difficult subjects in a sensitive, politically aware manner.

Georg Barkas

A friend, a mentor, and a frequent collaborator, Georg Barkas introduced Andrea to tying and has provided the much of technical basis for their work. Georg is known for politically inflected and interdisciplinary approach to tying.

Theatrical Intimacy Education

As a formal, recognized field within the arts, intimacy work is relatively new. However, components of it have been an important parts of the arts for quite a long time. TIE takes an accessible to theatrical intimacy education that aims to mitigate the inequalities that came from the formation of a new institutionally supported discipline. While Andrea has studied intimacy work with several organizations, TIE’s approach of de-loading (and intentionally re-loading only as necessary), fostering environments that emphasize autonomy and consent, and the creation of maintenance of professional boundaries and procedures has been a point of reference that for all the tools Andrea wishes to bring to their collaborators and teach to their students.