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Natanja Den Beoft

Natanja Den Beoft
Master-class: «Being Here Now»

We touch...we meet...something happens...

This workshop will be about the basic nature of improvisation, which is being in the very present, in a field of possibilities.

It will be about choosing and not choosing,
    about inhibiting rushing into the future while not lingering in the past,
        about flow and resistance,
            about being 'true' to oneself and the dance at the same time...

and last but not least: about improvising from the very rich universe of sensations when dancing in and out of touch.

The classes will be infused with the work I've been doing over the past years in Aikido and Feldenkrais. I'm deeply interested in the many rich ways of movement in the body and how we perceive it and communicate through it. Areas where the personal touches the generic and the cultural interest me in a theatrical sense.



Natanja Den Beoft
Natanja den Boeft is a freelance artist/teacher based in Amsterdam.
She has been teaching dance since 1987, in (contact)improvisation, technique, composition and performance skills, to professional dancers and actors, as well as amateurs in a wide range of backgrounds.
From 1992-1999 she was a staffmember at the Theaterschool Amsterdam, department 'School for New Dance Development', in improvisation and contact-improvisation. She regularly teaches workshops and guest classes at various dance-academies and studios throughout Europe and in Japan.
In 1986 she started her ongoing practice in Aikido. She practices and teaches at the Shin Budo Kai dojo in Amsterdam.
The practice of Aikido has over the years become an important influence in her dancework, especially in contact-imprvisation, for its use of energy, centered strength, space and direction.
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.