Athletics of Intimacy, improvisations

Movement Research, Saturdays 11 – 1 p.m. est.  Beginning September 21, 2024

These classes will combine skills and applications of decades of somatic research that include release techniques and body-mind practices that explore transitions and systems and patterns of development and evolution, embodiments of Contact Improvisation, and dance tunings within solo, duet (strong emphasis on partnering), and ensemble dancing. The interest and focus are in the very physical, sensorial, and imaginative, and in discovering new challenges and risks within our movement – of both body and mind – towards improvisational and compositional processes. This class plays with honoring the individual within the ensemble. Each student brings their own unique history into a shared experience of creating together a living presence.

(athletics: involving the use of physical skills or capabilities, as strength, agility, or stamina; intimacy: closeness of observation or knowledge of a subject)

 

movementresearch.org

Somatics, Improvisation and the Poetics of Performance, Venice Italy

24-28 of june 2020
11.00 am – 6.00 pm

Centro Teatrale di Ricerca – Venice (Italy)

Somatics Improvisation and the Poetics of Dance

This intensive workshop is experiential research of somatic practices, contact and improvisations, and structures and scores for dancing. Students will discover, explore, separate, integrate and improvise with physical systems and patterns to make visible physiological rhythms of support and creativity. We will explore anatomy and physiology to better understand the mechanics of movement. Through exposing contradictions in the body and engaging with our imaginations, we will widen choice, create discernment and practice embodiment and composition.
The course, designed for teachers, creators and performers in dance and theatre, will bring forth skills, tools and practical experience of somatic studies and improvisation, to become more tuned to physical centres and subtleties of touch, direction and intention. It will explore how to use these discoveries to tune the physical instrument of body and mind, and as a source for creative practice and the poetics of the human being through dancing, voicing, writing and reading.
There will be two classes a day working in the studio and outside. We will have jams and also spontaneous events.
Each participant will bring a seed of an idea and create a short solo during the course of the workshop. The solo can be sourced from a work already in progress, from discoveries in the workshop, or a structured improvisation that will develop during the time at CTR.
There will be an informal public showing the last evening.

THIS EVENT WAS CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19 AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED IN 2022.

Bearnstow at Parker Pond – August 4-10, 2024

August 4 – 10, 2024 :  I will once again be teaching an intensive workshop entitled Combining Disciplines for Creative Practice – a workshop exploring improvisational and somatic approaches to dance making- at Bearnstow on Parker Pond in Maine.

This creative residency is a return to community.  Community of dance and landscape, learning more together about our personal natures within the natural setting of beautiful Bearnstow.  It is a renewal and a recharge.

The workshop itself brings together decades of dance and improvisation, somatic research, theater of the body and vocal practices. It will offer students the opportunity to discover the innate wisdom of the body as source and towards creative performance. Basic anatomy and phys­iology expand our range of choice and the quality of movement and voice and enable us to make the in­visible visible. Our investigations will include the ex­ternal space, time and place, using the environ­ment of Bearnstow as the landscape of the imagi­nation. 

Through improvisation and composition we will explore musicality and phrasing, how the senses influence and motivate our movement choices, and how we craft time and space. We will explore and work in all of Bearnstow—forest, lake, paths, cabins, weather. There will be time each day for an early morning yoga class, group sessions, and individual time for exploring and developing material. And there will be time to wander in the wonder of Bearnstow for research and relaxation. Each student will keep a journal of activities, experiences, observations, and thoughts that will be a blueprint for the making of work that will be informally shared with one another at the end of the workshop.

The time at Bearnstow will be very much about the unfolding of each participant’s imagination and the shaping and crafting of it as we engage within community and all that is the nature of Bearnstow.

 

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