Allowing yourself to play
CI & Contemporary dance technique

In this master class Contemporary Dance technique and Contact Improvisation are going to mutually intertwine, and exchange energy like partners in a duet dance.

The focus and the release specific to Contemporary Dance will help us better understand our body, enter with relaxation and smile in Contact, strengthen our body and freely direct our internal flow. All this, surely, will give us more courage and trust in our body while engaging in Contact dance. At the same time, pair interactions, and the overall movement investigation specific to Contemporary Dance, will become more productive and profound: movement control, external points of attention, support, direction, weight, mutually sensing partner's center.

We will include elements and principles that we use in our personal work as dance partners:

• Jumping and support
• Soft falling
• the "zero point"
• Redirecting the movement
• Guiding the point of focus

And, not to forget, along all this intense work together... dancing, noticing, and dancing again :) we are going to spice up our learning process with tasty humor and play ;)

Contact Improvisation for beginners
Newcomers wanted!

"Contact Improvisation" dance - a wonderful opportunity to have a physical dialogue with a partner, with the space, with yourself.

CI includes the "physicality" of our body manifestation, and the "chemistry" of our state of mind, emotions, memory, mood, breath, personal rhythm, speed... Step by step, addressing first the physical laws, then building up towards basic principles of CI, we are going to discover how touch, attention to breathing and awakened emotions of our body, are going to enrich and expand our physical dialog. We are going to observe how, by using simple stuff and accessible directions, our dance will unfold in its greatest bodily and emotional manifestation.

We are inviting you to play, dancing, and playing, dance!

Bio

Alexandra and Serghey started their collaboration in 1997, in a modern dance group "Voices", under the direction of Angela Doniy. They became a duet 2000. Since then they dance, improvise, teach, and choreograph together. They take part in international projects performing and teaching. Together they organize international projects and festivals in Moldova.

They organized 6 international festivals: "Impulse to grow" in 2000, "Traditions and modernity" in 2001, "Phenomenon of relations" and "Gender and cultural Identity in dance" in April and September 2003, 5th international festival "Interaction" in 2006, "Children and adults, points of intersection" in 2009. They are guiding weekly jams of Contact Improvisation, and a continuous series of master classes and events of contemporary dance choreography In Moldova.

They are also the leaders of contemporary and folk dance school "Fantezia" in Chisinau, choreographers and dancers of contemporary dance and performance group "Voices".

Teaching geography: Moldova, Ukraine, Belorussia, Bulgaria, Israel, Estonia, Russia, Latvia, Italy, France.

Dancing with Others - Dancing for Others

In this workshop we will spend our time and invest our bodies in the principles, skills, and physical explorations proposed by contact improvisation. We will also be asking questions about performance making and study what happens when we dance CI not only with others (our partners, but at the same time for others (an audience). So we will watch each other performing CI or performing dance informed by CI. By doing that, we deepen our understanding of what we look for and look at when we watch dance. We also learn about what changes in us when being watched. What changes in the body, in the concentration, in our compositional minds? Or how does our dancing for others change when CI and qualities of touch inform it? We will play with performance tasks and scores and how they clarify, satisfy, or challenge our performance interests.

This workshop is designed for people who want to develop their contact dancing as well as their appetite for performance making. You don’t need to be an expert of either CI, instant composition, or performing, but you should have enough movement experience to be able to engage with sensitivity, playfulness, seriousness, and foolishness into trying to dance with and for each other.

Bio

Susanne Martin is a Berlin based choreographer, performer, researcher, and teacher in the field of contemporary dance and theatre. She presents her work internationally in solo performances and collaborative stage works. Her artistic practice and research focuses on improvisation, contact improvisation, narrations of the aging body, humour and irony in dance, and performance as research. Her book Dancing Age(ing): Rethinking Age(ing) In and Through Improvisation Practice and Performance will be published by transcript in January 2017.

She studied at Rotterdam Dance Academy, Folkwang University Essen, Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, and Middlesex University London, which earned her a BA, MA, and a PhD. She keeps studying with her colleagues, friends, students... and plans to continue and continue and continue...

Selection of recent performance works:

• The Fountain of Youth, solo premiered 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden
• The Fountain of Age, solo premiered 2015 in London, UK
• Doctor D. meets Doctor V., duet with Alex Nowitz premiered 2016 in Berlin
• 7 Minutes of Fame, a genre-mix performance series curated together with Marlène Colle, Lisa Stockinger, and Gabriele Reuter, since 2016 in Berlin

www.susannemartin.de

Poetic Movement

The intensive will be about improvising in contact. The contact will include direct physical touch but also contact of other sorts:

• Attention to the relation between what one does and what others do across time and space.
• Attention to how we create and interpret purpose and meaning in movement.
• Attention to the process of collaborative real-time composition.

The workshop will use some of the core ideas from my practice, which I usually refer to as "Poetic Movement". This practice involves bringing attention to, among many other things:

• Embodied memory and imagination
• The relation between attention, intention and action
• Meter, rhythm and phrasing
• Proximity
• The directive and adaptive phases of movement
• Spatial disposition
• Action, reaction and interaction
• The structure of the human journey through vertical space

We will touch on all these elements to various degrees during the workshop.

The intention is to connect the inquiry into how to do things to questions of why we do them. To understand better what we watch for when we try to make sense of movement. To become better at understanding the movement of our dancing partners and, through better embodied understanding, to become an enriched improviser.

The course will be of interest to actors, acrobats, dancers and musicians as well as to people with a background in Contact Improvisation. It is also open to complete beginners.

Bio

"At the centre of the work is my experience of how disciplined attention and research can lead us to a great depth of complexity and mystery. The point is not so much to explain things as to appreciate them more deeply."

Steve Batts has been dancing and teaching Contact Improvisation and related practices for around 35 years. He creates work, performs and teaches internationally as well as being artistic director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre in Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
www.echoechodance.com