Cost: £60 (£30 deposit to secure your place) – to book, email Rob – robdothopper@aol.co.uk
Described recently as The Godmother of Improvisation, Katie Duck has influenced and inspired generations of dancers through her performing and teaching. This will be a great opportunity to work with her over two days on a rare visit to the UK… Book your places now!!
A creation process towards real time performance
For Dancers / /Actors/ Performance artists
“Tell the brain to tell the mind to shut up — body obey me”
I guide performers through physical exercises that highlight how the eyes and ears affect movement choices both for the performer and for the live public, alongside lecture materials from my research The developmental Brain – “Why we learn to walk”.
“There is a difference between seeing, looking and watching and a difference between hearing and listening. An artist can choose if they wish for a public to watch or to see — to hear or to listen.
I choose for the public to see and listen, and do my best to gather a crowd in that quest. It doesn’t always work and it is never 100% of the public. But because I choose it, who I am as an artist is clarified.
Are you interested in a public watching or looking at your body? Or do you want the public to be reminded that they have a body?”
I have invented games to encourage a “tight to loose” process integrating emotions, feelings and intuition. This work extends towards improvisation sessions with set time frames, fictional front with the option to choose pause, flow or exit. Each of these choices have an in depth study for how to place real time composition in a performance platform.
The aim and objective of my workshops is to ask artists to question and articulate within their practice “what is your relationship to public”?
I place “body” as the glue for integrating writing, music and object.
“Katie Duck is the Zorba the Greek of improvisation: earthy, feeling every mode of sensuality, preposterous, irresistible, polymorphously perverse. Watching her dance is like watching her body think. She is responsive to every situation and obviously enjoys getting into trouble.” Dance Magazine
Katie Duck Bio
I am a director/performer/teacher who has been working professionally since 1976. I take a microscopic study for the role improvisation plays in real time composition integrating music, movement, object and writing. Improvisation, in my performances, is not the antithesis of choreography or composition; it is how I make my art work out of practice both in the studio setting and the newness of real time improvised performance. My performances are about the experience of being there, you are participating in the event and thus, in a sense, the work”. My practice is a reflection of what I believe art in the theatre can only be; live.
“Duck’s sturdy purposefulness makes even her most arbitrary actions seem part of a life-and-death odyssey” Judith Mackrell
5th-7th April 2019 11am-6pm £90 (£45 deposit to secure place)- to book, email Rob – robdothopper@aol.co.uk
Tuning Scores (originated by Lisa Nelson) is a dance practice that unveils sense desires as motivators; movement as collateral choreography; time as music and rhythm; space as palette and environment.
Tuning promotes collaboration between individuals willing to engage, play, and occupy shared space. A collaborative communication process, Tuning proposes ensemble creation where each participant embodies their unique responsibility for action/non-action. Friction between consorting images provides feedback for the groups’ collective learning, discovering, inventing. Relying on our life-long underlying movement skills— like CI experience or expressions such as singing, spoken word, object puppeteering, space design— we will use our resources to serve and tune the images revealed as we improvise.
Class will include rigorous sensory warm-ups, physicalizing thru CI, and playing with a cluster of scores to grow edges.
Karen Nelson continues to be a cornerstone of dance improvisation in the US’ Pacific Northwest and abroad. A long-time mutator of the form Contact Improvisation (CI), she co-founded mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability and Diverse Dance Research Retreat while later joining Lisa Nelson/ Image Lab’s developing of Tuning Scores for performance. She explores dance history and currency that centers intersections of practitioner experience and interrogates whiteness within her own embodiment and larger community, often collaborating with artists around the world. Her teaching approach brings classic origins of CI and Tuning through exercises, images, practice and discussion along with a view towards engendering individual possession and evolution of the forms through one’s own experience.