INTEGRATED Contemporary DANCE IMPROVISATION practice
This class is for dedicated dancers who wish to deepen their dance practice and to create with greater facility. New entries into dance lead to connected, inventive dancing, rooted in a technically informed, creative body. The class begins with a solo warm up to activate body intelligence and to invite physical states that enable ease, energy, awareness and releasing of holding in the body/mind. Dancers are challenged to engage on more levels so action is articulated from “state based” dancing. Aesthetic partnering and ensemble composition are fueled by images, tools and concepts offered within a focused flow. Discourse is welcome.
* new entries into dance
* accessing body intelligence
* releasing holding in the body/mind
* articulating with the contemporary body
* rigor = compelling performance states
* dancing on more levels
* discovering visceral textures
* exploring aesthetics for partnering
* putting the imagination back into dance
* ensemble composition/genre shifting in contemporary performance
Tools offered are from Nita Little’s “Mind in Motion” improvisation practice, contemporary European dance, post-modern American dance, chi kung and experimental theater and Leralee Whittle’s Textural Threading Technique (which works with the imagination and instigates dialogue between the body/field and spatial planes. Using threads of information in and around the body, assist coordination, sensory input, and textural changes in dancing).
CONTENT FOR WORKSHOPS
Textural Threading Technique is a technique using threads of information in and around the body to assist coordination, sensory input and textural changes in the body. Textural Threads feed information about changing energy lines and forces related to the skeleton, muscle tissue and energetic field. Textural Threading works with the imagination and instigates “dialogue” between the hands, body/field and spatial planes. Dancers can apply the technique to generating contemporary visceral textures, new physical states, dancing from forces, and easeful action in relationship to spatial planes.
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Contemporary Contact Improvisation
Contact dance is approached with an emphasis on working with creative and social forces, para-theatrical response and ironic interaction. Performers craft relational vernaculars. Improvisers work with dichotomies, impeding and redirecting impulse, routing expression through the body and varied approaches for relating. Group composition emerges from group focus and concepts. By understanding one’s inherent aesthetic in relationship to collaborators, choreographic choices result in imbued, potent images.
FORCES Social, Pervasive, Creative
In the practice of working with forces we acknowledge there is something larger at work. Performers can intend the activation of forces and direct, impede or amplify them. Forces work through the mind. They can be localized in or routed through the body. They can also be imagined in space.
Space
Space can be used to represent external forces at work on the individual or group. Space is an endless source for the imagination. We give space various meanings which, in turn, defines our role in space.
States
States are a result of activating creative forces in the the body that change according to social/physical interaction and external sources/stimuli.
Sourcing
One might source from musicality, physical contact, amplified expression or abstract action. Extensive practice in perceiving touch, sound and movement can activate action rooted in articulation of specific singular or layered states.
Dichotomies- Splitting Focus and Layering
Forces at work through and against simultaneously introduces possibilities for dancing complex dance vernaculars that encompass diametrically opposing dynamics and layered qualitative states.
Audience
Stretching the boundaries of how we relate as performers and how we change space can compel audiences to enter, follow and resist the space as it changes. How the audience participates can cause them to question, challenge their comfort levels, fill in with their imaginations or enter new states themselves.
Leralee Whittle teaches material gleaned from luminaries in fields of physical performance and from her own creative process fueled by performance art and international contemporary performance. She worked for 12 years with mentor/collaborator of improvisation and contact improvisation, Nita Little and learned for varying durations from Anouk Van Dijk (Contemporary), Jesse Curtis (Interdisciplinary), Frey Faust (Post-Modern), Meg Stuart (Contemporary), Julie Oak (Experimental Theatre), Allasane Kane (Senegalese) and Regina DeCosse (Modern).