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Manuela Blanchard

Manuela Blanchard
Master-class: «Earth- and waterdance - Contact Improvisation in Water»

Contact in Water could be described as a shared journey into a world made of playful spirals, soft embraces and suspended timelessness. Since no one is leading the dance, each of the movers engage deeply in a non verbal communication, which allows for something common to take over and guide them through space.

The warm water invites you to let go and to experiment an organic and fluid way of moving. You learn how to play with its resistance and dynamic, how to transition between following the waves and making soft and clear propositions. You go into aquatic and subaquatic explorations with your partners, experience effortless breathing and play with the balance between weight and weightlessness.

Moving from water to the dance studio will allow us to take the sensation of fluidity and the soft moving support into our dances on earth.



Manuela Blanchard
Manuela Blanchard (from Switzerland) has been teaching contact improvisation and new dance for the past 7 years after having trained intensively and performed in dance, physical theatre, clown and synchronised swimming for many years. Discovering improvised dance touched a very profound core in her, and led her to meet great teachers and to continue to explore the form with others. Manuela is also a water body therapist, certified in “Water Dance”, “Watsu” and passionated by “Healing Dance”. Her love for contact improvisation and aquatic bodywork has brought her to teach regularly Contact in Water, in Switzerland and abroad.
www.earthandwaterdance.com
Intensive teachers   CI classes teachers   Special Workshops teachers
 
Adrian Russi Alexandra Bezrodnova Alfiya Rakhmanova
Benno Voorham Danya Elraz (class 1) Benno Voorham
Natanja Den Beoft Danya Elraz (class 2) Leilani Weis
Scott Wells Debora Sbaiz (class 1) Manuela Blanchard
  Debora Sbaiz (class 2)  
  Ekaterina Velichko  
  Ilona Kenova & Yaniv Mintzer  
  Itay Yatuv (class 1)  
  Itay Yatuv (class 2)  
  Leilani Weis (class 1)  
  Leilani Weis (class 2)  
  Maria Grudskaya  
festival program

July 9-12 - Workshop
for beginners and all levels with
Benno Voorham;

July 9-12 - Workshop
for beginners and all levels with
Manuela Blanchard;

July 16th - Teachers performance and the festival project in Moscow Theatre;

July 17 - 24 - Main part of The Festival
8 days of dancing in the countryside;

July 27 - 31 - Contact-tango Workshop
for all levels with Leilani Weis;


INTENSIVES

The longest and the most important workshops at the festival. Four teachers do their classes separately during five days. On 19, 20, 23 and 24th of July intensives begin at 9.30, on 21st they start at 1330.

CI CLASSES

On 19, 20 and 23rd of July we have Contact Improvisation workshops/classes. They start at 1430.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH labs

The performance research laboratories are meant to become a basis and tool for participants who want to take on the opportunity to perform at the two performances that are happening at the festival site. A lab can be the chance to carry out one small project with a constant group of people or to investigate different themes around performance each day. You can participate in laboratories one or more days.
We would like to create the freedom for the participants to develop ideas and find ways to use them in performance. We want to invite everybody, participating in the festival, students as well as teachers, to propose their ideas and questions for a performance research lab. Ideas could contain how improvisational forms and contact improvisation are a performance art. Including possible themes like trio, site specific, spontaneous composition, how do we communicate within an improvised piece, working with props, the use of voice, sound, music, texts/poetry, relationship to choreography...
These labs can happen only once or continue for several days, depending on demand. People, who feel confident about facilitating group work and enjoy it, are welcome to offer themselves as facilitators, even if they don’t have a personal performance research theme that they want to investigate.

Labs will start on the first day of the festival. Themes will be chosen from a pool of ideas and questions about improvisation and performance, proposed to us in advance before the festival. We will create a system (i.e. blackboard) for this pool to be added to, so that ideas that come up during the festival can be included in the labs, by a new timetable each day.

ONE-2-ONE SESSIONS

These are 20 min long individual sessions with teachers. In the begining of the festival there will be list of teachers and time where you can write your name to reserve this time for your lesson.

Underscore

An introduction to the Underscore, a long jamming/contact/improvisation score that Nancy has been developing since 1990. The Underscore guides us through a progression of “changing states” of body and mind—from solo sensitizing to gravity and support, into group circulation and contact improvisation engagements, opening out into whole-room compositional awareness and interaction, and back to rest and reflection.
“The Underscore talk” (required for participation in the practice) will give some background and will outline the structure in detail. After this concentrated instruction on the nature of the Underscore, participants will be ready for the physical practice itself, which will include periods of silence and periods of live music improvised/composed by Mike Vargas.