Workshops
AUGUST 21-25th WORKSHOPS
Open level – no movement experience needed (older than 15y)
A level – 3-5 years of experience in this dance field is needed;
B level – 5 and more years of experience needed;
C level – professional dancers, choreographers, dance students;
C+ level – professional dancers, choreographers with 2+ years experience in choreography and stage work.
PAUL PUI WO LEE – Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® – for B&C levels and open level
What’s more possible for you beyond your habitual? Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lessons train your kinaesthetic awareness that improve your understanding and image of yourself to help you develop a more refined ability of your nervous system to manoeuvre your skeleton with less unnecessary efforts. Through exploring some unhabitual movements, you discover and embody strategies of moving that are easier, more flexible, more effective, healthier, and even more pleasurable, so you may be moving in ways that reflects your deeper human potential.
Oftentimes we put a huge limitation on the freedom of our movements because we are (consciously or subconsciously) trying to achieve what we have acquired to know as “right or wrong,” “correct or incorrect.” Feldenkrais lessons, therefore, develop our ability to sense what works for us individually, so we may discover our options beyond these programmed patterns. We get to realise how we can have a more mature authority over our “bodies”. We get to experience greater flexibility because we begin to focus on the quality of HOW we do something, and not be weighed down by only focusing on WHAT we have physically.
Understanding and broadening your neuromuscular possibilities can be helpful for injury prevention, assurance in performance, and artistic vitality. These ATM® lessons are a good infusion of awareness and sensory information for sounder judgment and colourful creativity in a ballet class… See you how may have more sensation to think with, more thoughts to feel with, more feelings to sense with, and perhaps your imagination takes on another dynamic?
PAUL PUI WO LEE – Ballet (or just shifting through and flirting with classical form…) – for B&C levels
We will investigate how a ballet class can be enjoyed as an active improvisation within a familiar framework. Can we depart from the image of ballet as something square, rigid, and archaic, but instead use it as a skeleton to find a living movement that is informed by our current personal possibilities? Can your expression through ballet be fashionable – relevant to the moment?
I like to open up the ballet class as a playground where you can dare to experiment with different options to enrich your artistic expression and be more multifaceted in how you develop your technical ease. The explorations and principles of the Feldenkrais Method help cultivate a better embodied intelligence that allows organic movement strategies to emerge and add to your palette of technical and artistic options. What’s right and what’s wrong? What’s perfection? This questioning could lead to something exciting. Steps in ballet are a means and not an end, right? Ballet can be more than just military exercises. It can also be poetry weaved from the quality of your personal choices – your brave artistry.
It is very much recommended to take a Feldenkrais ATM class before ballet!
NINA FUNK – Countertechnique workshops – for A&B level and for C level
By continuously and sequentially directing parts of the body away from each other in space, Countertechnique allows the moving dancer to work with an ever-changing dynamic balance. This dynamic balance reduces the pressure on the overall body structure and can be changed at any given moment.
Countertechnique® provides tools for body and mind to deal with the demanding dance practice of the 21st century. It is a movement system to help the dancer think about the dancing body, focusing on the process of incorporating information into action. Within a clear structure of exercises the Countertechnique® class thoroughly prepares the body for rehearsal and performance, enabling dancers to move bigger, more fluidly and more spatially, while becoming stronger and more flexible. Dancers are encouraged to be pro-active in discovering connections and solutions, to be less concerned with judging themselves and to work in a healthy way with regard to body and mind. Countertechnique® makes daily training a valuable investment in the dancer’s development and interesting personal research. Countertechnique® was created and developed by Dutch choreographer, dancer and teacher Anouk van Dijk, former artistic director of Australian dance company Chunky Move.”
DEFNE ERDUR – Workshop “Every Body Know” – open level
There is nothing new under the sun! And yet what is already there invites us to dive deeper into the layers of our presence; to seek a conscious yet liberated and sovereign place to dance from.
In this workshop, we are zooming into our physical, emotional and mental foundation together. We are working with the sensations and anatomical make up of our bodies, directing our awareness to responses for inner and outer stimuli. With the aid of more analytic, anatomical images, various artistic tools (i.e. writing, drawing, sounding etc.) and our imagination we are working with our bodies, discovering relations between our feelings, thoughts, postures and movements. Building awareness of our perception system in action, gradually allowing habitual patterns to change, we find our own resources for resilience: strength, flexibility and endurance. Principles from Experiential Anatomy, Developmental Movement, Authentic Movement, Expressive Art Therapies and Contact Improvisation are being at our guidance to relate to our own unique self and reach out to dance with others.
Let’s fly out together (dancers, non-dancers) into an elevated flow, experiencing self-sufficient, self-satisfied and effortless bodies as we dance.
DEFNE ERDUR – Contact improvisation – open level
undecided decisions
puzzles of orientation and disorientation in Contact Improvisation*
In this 5 day workshop we will be working towards developing our orientation skills for more free flowing dances. The stimuli coming from within ourselves, from our partners, from space (not only gravity and momentum but also visual information) can be very disorienting and demand multi-tasking. We need to be attentive, centred and ready to let go of our grasp at any given moment.
Together we will be playing with :
- sensing in the anatomical make up of our bodies
- finding support systems in and around our bodies
- directing our attention to inner and outer stimuli
- getting comfortable in continuous off-balance
- swimming in gravity and riding momentum to continuously find, lost and re-find ourselves
- reading not only physical signs but intentions, invitations, energy flows
- being aware of proximate space; attending to front, back and side spaces around our bodies
- being aware of distant space, reading potential space for travelling
- co-creating instant compositions
We will be cultivating courage to be clumsy, and to find techniques to ride and compose that clumsiness.
As always, my personal aim is to be curious and find authenticity for improvising rather than falling victim to learnt movement patterns.
* “Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton. The improvised dance form is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to open to these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.
Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one’s basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.”—early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s, from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979
THEO CLINKARD – Contemporary Dance Class – for B&C level
Theo’s classes explore how we can bring greater attention to our sensory perception of the space, each other and ourselves in motion. By balancing these experiences with an awareness of our physical structure and the connections and directions within the moving body, Theo is interested in how we can find greater clarity and a sense of being ‘available’ to both witness and be witnessed whilst dancing. Set to some great music, each class will be a mix of exploration, led movement and devised material to encourage vivid, articulate and expansive mindful dancing.
THEO CLINKARD – Creative workshop – for B&C level
Dancers are invited to embody and discuss the practices that lie at the heart of Theo’s current choreographic works. He draws upon a range of exploratory and creative tasks from various creative processes, many of which aim to divert performers self-consciousness by focusing on response; to touch, the visual field, conditions of time, language, vivid imagery and to imagined realities. He is passionate about cultivating generous safe spaces for genuine experimentation and connectivity for all those that attend.
JUDITH SANCHEZ RUIZ – Your Own God, Intensive Improvisation – for C level
Your Own God’s departed from JSR’s choreographic process and experience as a performer from diverse techniques and styles throughout her long international career.
Research is a state of mind in which things flow, widen, awake, transcend… I teach and train dancers for technical functionality, creative instinct, high performance, and transformation. This workshop will trigger your un/comfortable zone. A “pull-out” from the present moment and, within it, of an unpublished present of chaos and vulnerability. I’ve designed the « radio exercise »: allowing radical changes of states, provoking a shift of action in the brain that combines spontaneously present determined information, making space for complexity and coincidence. All these explorations are an integral part of my process as a choreographer, exercises that both influence and structure my creative work. I will guide you to look for the unknown exploration of different approaches to the movement, and we will learn how to develop movement in composition with space and in a relationship with others. I will encourage you to own your movement, find precision and wildness all together but overall, live in your dance!
Your Own God at TICTAC from Judith Sánchez Ruíz JSR Company on Vimeo.
ELINA PIRINEN – Creative workshop “Reports from the dark rooms of the body” – for C level
Elina Pirinen’s workshop invites you to approach corporeality, physicality, movement, psyche and thinking in a phantasmatic way. Her practice invites you to travel to the connection between the subconscious and movement technique – we dive into the secrets of deep joy, intuition, silliness, wildness, transgression, liberation and fantastical whims. Just think of all things fun and extraordinary that emerge when the body comes out of the body in the most different forms, minds, aesthetics, colours, events, situations, temperaments, both as a subjective and collective experience! Through various improvisational and sustained imaginations that sensitise the anatomy and connect to physicality, we approach the remarkable psychodynamics of the body, form our own special dances and parties of the living body, alone and together. The course also uses different materials as lovers of the body and imagination.
AUGUST 28-30th WORKSHOPS
ANTONI ANDROULAKIS – Fluxness (floorwork meets acrodance) – for B&C levels
The practice is a synthesis of the different ways I have approached both floor work & acrodance over the past 10 years. It breaks down the question of “how to use gravity as a movement generator?” Using mainly improvisation, this question will be answered through the exploration of different concepts such as:
- Becoming conscious of the use of our weight through the points of contact we create with the floor.
- Exploring the idea of being both relaxed & active; using the needed tension in order to facilitate movement while getting rid of unnecessary rigidity.
- Using our body as a holistic organism. Seeing it as a whole rather than separated, we will find ways to make our full body contributes to the movement.
I will also share my background in acrobatics. Looking at different patterns & figures as movements rather than “tricks” to include them in one’s own dance. I do not differentiate between the way I deal with movement and how I deal with my daily life. My teaching is therefore a synthesis of my intuitive understanding of things I am actively practising: awareness, challenge & playfulness. No acrobatic experience is needed but a basic floorwork knowledge is required.
Fluxness from Antoni Androulakis on Vimeo.
JONATHAN BURROWS – Choreography workshop: Writing Dance – for C+ level
Jonathan Burrows leads a workshop looking at questions of how to balance the many and overlapping elements at play in the making of a performance, including concept, context, image, form, dramaturgy, materials and daily practice. The workshop will be a mixture of practical work and discussion, with the aim of allowing each person to re-examine how they approach their own work and practice.
SALLY DAVISON – DanceAbility Workshop: All Bodies Speak – open level
This movement improvisation workshop is open to all people with and without disabilities. You do not need any prior dance experience to attend. Together we will create a space for listening to ourselves and others to find the common ground of movement language present in the group. This creates new ways to be and dance together in a field of mutual learning which includes all of us.
The DanceAbility method has been developed over the last 30 years from all the people who have attended workshops all over the world. It has been developed by Alito Alessi (US).
PLAIN LANGUAGE TEXT
If you like to dance then this workshop is for you. We find movements we can do and how we can talk with our bodies.
SALLY DAVISON – Afterthoughts: methods and tools – open level
This session is for people interested in developing an understanding of how to include people with different physical and intellectual abilities in their work. After the direct experience of the morning class we will look at the pedagogical underpinnings of the DanceAbility method and the tools which support inclusion. Participants will be able to ask questions and share situations so we can learn together how these tools can be further applied. Participants will be able to take away these tools to their classes, groups or communities. (Please note participants must attend the morning DanceAbility workshop for this session).