Poetic Resonance, Harmonics and Polyrhythms, Steve Batts
| About masterclass: | More than one tone. More than one place. More than one rhythm.
Contact Improvisation can be practiced in various ways, for example as meditation, as a game, as an athletic task.
In this class we will be treating it as a shared participatory artistic practice. The intention is to liberate and take pleasure in, the intuitive and poetic movement sensibility.
The classes will focus on the idea of harmonics. Harmonics in movement is the creation, at the same time, of different but related states. We will look at the harmonics created by relationship between the actions of two people moving together and we will explore the possibility for an individual to be aware of the details of the complex of states, which he or she might be producing at one moment.
The classes will be appropriate for anyone with a previous interest in movement work of any kind. They will also be challenging for experienced dancers of Contact Improvisation. | | About Steve Batts: | Steve is co-artistic director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company. He began dancing as an antidote to studying for a degree in Politics Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in the early eighties. After setting up Jointwork Dance Group, which created work and organised projects in England he moved to Amsterdam in 1989 to establish Sidetrack Dance Theatre with Natanja Den Boeft. In 1991 he began working with Ursula Laeubli and together they founded Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, which has been based in Steve’s home region of Northern Ireland since 1997. His work, both with Echo Echo, and independently, has taken him far and wide as a teacher and a performer. He has collaborated with many artists from theatre, music and dance and has built up a reputation as an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher.
“I think of Contact Improvisation, in it’s ‘pure’ form, as essentially a participatory form. It is a kind of folk dance. Although my artistic and performance work is very influenced by Contact Improvisation, my teaching of the practice is primarily concerned with creating a context for the participants themselves where they can deepen their experience of the many facets of the form and to be enriched by it. The art happens in the sharing”.
|
|
