Teachers
Kirstie Simson
Dance Improvisation That Offers Resilience and Support in Difficult Times
Kirstie Simson will share her work and underlying embodied philosophy over the course of 4 sessions. She will also facilitate an evening sharing of 2 films she has made, followed by a talk about her relationship to physical practice in the context of the troubled times we are living through.
There is deep inspiration and rigor in a practice of improvisation that posits vulnerability at its heart. Developing the skills to be able to care for, engage, respect and respond to that state of vulnerability in oneself and others gives life to improvisation that is powerful and transformative.
Bio
This is the work that Kirstie engenders through facilitated exercises, open time for play and exploration, movement scores, observations and discussion. Much of the work is experienced through partnering and connection with others, balanced with solo time for processing and reflection. Kirstie shares the movement practices and underlying philosophies she has developed over forty years of teaching dance improvisation. She is interested in creating a safe space where participants feel they are seen, heard, and supported to discover, move, and share from the deepest parts of themselves. This helps facilitate meaningful dances that evolve our practices.
Kirstie draws from her knowledge of Contact Improvisation, dance techniques, the Alexander technique, Aikido, meditation and her extensive experience of improvisation in performance. Her work explores the huge potential of the body’s response to the primal urge to move, inspired by the energy released through human interaction, physical challenge and playfully daring to go beyond inherent ideas of limitation.
https://www.kirstiesimson.com/
Charlie Morrissey
Move On Up
This workshop will explore movement as a primary mode of being in and engaging with the world.
It will utilise practices that map and un-map our bodies, it will explore sensory and extra-sensory modes of engaging with ourselves, others and the environment to notice how we compose and are composed.
We will work with our own and other bodies in and out of contact, building multi-directional, grounded movement, engaging with the lightness and weight of our moving selves.
Imagination as a creative and basic tool of physical survival will be central.
The classes will be fed by practices of Contact Improvisation, Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine, Lisa Nelson’s Tuning `Scores and by my own ongoing movement and performance practices.
We will work with scores and structures that open space for exploration and discovery.
The work will be rigorous, physical and we will MOVE.
Moving as means of questioning
Moving as way of bringing into being
Moving as progression
Moving as way of being with
Moving as thinking
Moving as disruption
Moving as evolution
Moving to depart from and arrive to
Moving to be in
Moving to re-position
Moving to gain a perspective
Moving to destabilise
Moving on up
Bio
Charlie is a performer, teacher, collaborator and director who has been working with movement for more than 35 years.
He has worked with performance at small and large-scales in theatre, gallery and site-based contexts in the UK and internationally. Recent projects (23/24) include Supernature, a solo created with Siobhan Davies in response to her film Transparent at Wainsgate Chapel; Scáling, a duet with Markéta Stránska co-commissioned by Candoco and Sadlers Wells at Schwere Reiter: HERD – a large-scale site-specific sound project with Artichoke and Orlando Gough across multiple sites in Yorkshire; and Anushiye Yarnell’s A Marathon of Intimacies at Chapter in Cardiff. He is currently exploring dancing the Goldberg Variations with Lucy Suggate.
His work is influenced and inspired by long-term working relationships with artists including Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Scott Smith, K.J.Holmes, Kirstie Simson, Karen Nelson, Siobhan Davies, Katye Coe, Andrea Buckley, Becky Edmunds and many others.
Charlie also organises and co-curates Wainsgate Dances with his partner Rob Hopper in Yorkshire, UK – an artist-led space for experimental dance. It includes daily dance practice, residencies, workshops, and performances.
SARANTOULA SARANTAKI
Accepdαnce / The Magnetic Body
Acceptance deals with the action of receiving and the process of being received in the process of dancing. Through recognition, it all begins.
Once something is recognised through our senses, the space is open and the reception begins, therefore it moves and is being moved.
In this workshop we study these fundamental principals of the moving body in action and stillness through the lens of acceptance. We study how to participate physiologically in the process of accepdance, in which we open our material vessel for the consciousness to stream in and through. Through that process we allow the dance to come from an integrated place.
Acceptance acts as a liquid plasma fluid that runs through our systems and reveals the nature of our bodies in motion, raw, immediate and pure.
The work is grounded in the physiology of our moving body and it moves through different anatomical and spacial information with the intention to create inner space and align with outer space and field itself. The approach involves imagery and guidance that transmit embodied information as well as touch and work with the ground and ether.
Participants are welcome to join consciously in the process and an invitation to connect and integrate with their physical material.
The work will focus on solo, group as well as witnessing, it involves touch, listening and participating in the movement.
