Moving the environment: questions into form
with Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada
July 7 to 12, 2013
arrival: Sunday Noon, end: Friday 4PM
This workshop presents practical tools for researching how we physically interact with the environment and cultivates our ability to question again our root understandings of ordinary movement and what our physical sensations tell us. This ability is a basis for furthering our development as movers and dance makers.
Using physical sensation together with anatomical information we explore the details of how gravity and visual information flow through the muscular, skeletal, organ, and nervous system structures inside of our body.
The visible boundaries of our body are transparent to the force of gravity. Gravity does not know the difference between what is us and what is our environment. We move ourselves by extending our architecture into the environment. The environment answers. We move it and it moves us.
Exercises are designed to help us embody this duality.
This material is based in the legacy of information from Anatomical Releasing Technique, 40 years of dancing Contact Improvisation, explorations in contemporary dance and the personal movement research and performance practice of Daniel and Sakura .
- The movement of attention.
- Inside primary patterns: rolling, walking, crawling, running, and jumping.
- Space is a part of our body.
- Stillness organizing to move.
- What is an image?, What is being an image.
- How do we relate to physical objects.
- Seeing and being seen.
- How do we prepare for dancing?
- What is dance? What is the culture?!
Costs :
- Pedagogy: $200 - $170 if registration before June 25
- Room and board for 5 1/2 days (lunches and dinners): $200
How to register? See at the bottom of this page.
Bios:
Daniel Lepkoff
played a central role in the development of Release Technique with
John Rolland and Mary Fulkerson, and Contact Improvisation with
Steve Paxton beginning in the early '70's. Through workshops,
collaborations, performance projects, and personal movement
research, Daniel has continued to expand and deepen this function
approach to movement research. As a performer he is known for
composing dances that arises from the process of living movement; as
a teacher for his imagination and continual invention of original
techniques, making direct contact with information and pursuing his
own research and questions together with students. His work looks at
movement from life, a vision of living in an ongoing magical and
spontaneous physical dialogue with the environment. His approach
explores the form and composition of these interactions. He is one
of the founders of Movement Research in NYC.
Sakura
Shimada is
from Japan. In Japan, she studied Modern Dance, Ballet, Jazz, and
Japanese Fusion dance. She moved to New York City in 1997 and
studied at the Martha Graham Contemporary Dance school, Dance Space
Center, Movement Research and presented her own works. She was an
Artist Residency at Movement Research in 2008. She met Daniel
Lepkoff in 2001; since then she has been studying and working with
Daniel and has traveled internationally. Currently she lives in
Vermont and teaches an improvisation practice class which is
strongly focused on body information and observation of body mind
connection with movement. Her class is influenced by experiential
anatomy, Body Mind Centering, Aikido, and the experience of country
life.
She is a certified teacher of DanceAbility, completing the
training with Alito Alessi in Bogota one year ago. She current
teaches a weekly DanceAbilty class in Florence, Massachusetts.
