Intensive: “Alexander Technique into CI : Suspending in Action”
“In the last few years, I have been fascinated by the techniques we deploy to voluntarily learn new gestures. In Alexander Techniques, some argue that the muscles’ primary function is to maintain our integrity and security as upright critters against the instabilities and forces that disturb our equilibrium. The ability of the muscles to engage in movement would only come second—once we have “managed” to attain uprightness. Equilibration serves as the background (the shadow) of our gestures. It is on this ground that our voluntary movements are built: lifting one’s arm, catching, lifting, exchanging, throwing, jumping—and being able to do all this without falling.
Of course, this process is only made possible in the interaction with others and the environment within which we are woven, and through the permanent predictions we make concerning the effects of our gestures. This allows us to fine-tune our postural engagement when we lift an apple, a water bottle, or another human body. It is thanks to these anticipations that we do not fall each time we catch a weight.
A substantial part of Alexander Technique consists in developing a quality of attention that allows to maintain as close as possible to this continual adjusting in order to support the expressive potential of movement.
In Contact Improvisation, we co-fall with our partners, and play with our vertigos. Within this shared territory, we momentarily suspend individual and egocentered predictions to allow for the emergence of common gestures.
Can we enlarge this shared territory?
Can we teach ourselves to suspend our predictions concerning the effects of our gestures?
Can we inhabit a space of collective potential as a ground for new movements?
Can the quality of my relation to my environment influence and favor the necessary adaptation to the forces that be?
Can we practice what Alexander Techniques calls the “letting go”, not so much as an intentional activity, but as a capacity to hold the space open for indecision?”
“Tact of Teaching”s – meaning pedagogical thoughtfulness – are an invitation for teachers to find a point of contact for teaching together. Finding their individual teaching inquires and follow that together with their colleagues’. Assuming that practical knowing-in-action requires pedagogical sensitivity, vigilance, and tact we hope to challenge and inspire the teachers as well as the participants of these sessions.
LAB’s:
We reserved time slots for the laboratories to be proposed by the participants. In the labs you have the possibility to bring in or try out your own interests with the people sharing similar interests.
one2ones:
You can get one one2one session with one of the teachers for ~15 min. You come with your question, interest, wish for feedback. You can work 1 on 1, come with a friend or small group.
Kitchen Table is a setting for an open discussion about any topic (in this case in and around CI), but with a rule set to create a performance out of the ordinary. During a set time anyone interested can witness and/or participate in the discussion. The topics are open and the exchange of speakers is actively encouraged.
Schedule
Teachers
Matthieu Gaudeau (FR)
Matthieu Gaudeau (actor, dancer, Alexander Technique practicioner) has performed in theater and dance companies and collectives for two decades. Between 2004 and 2006, he directed the collective La Gouttière where he developped dance-theater processes and writings. Trained in Alexander Techniques between 2009 and 2013, he starts to question his pedagogy using the principles of inhibition and directed attention. Passionated with the organization of human gesture and its relationship to attention and posture, he co-founds, since 2014, the ICI and ICrEA projects in dance and neuroscience, where he designs experimental projects around joint attention. In 2015, he co-founded, with Asaf Bachrach, Romain Bigé and Marta Lucci, F.A.R. / School for Somatic Nomadism, a trans-somatic research group.
Romain Bigé (FR)
Romain Bigé (PhD) practices dance and philosophy. A dance improviser curious to bring philosophy in the dance studio, they dedicated a dissertation to Contact Improvisation (Le partage du mouvement, École Normale supérieure, 2017) which led them to curate two exhibitions: Gestes du Contact Improvisation, for the Musée de la danse in Rennes (2018) and Steve Paxton: Drafting Interior Techniques for Culturgest in Lisbon (2019). They teach philosophy to a variety of audiences: highschoolers, college students, dancers, somatic practionners, and are interested in developing techniques and concepts to weave dance, ecosomatic practices and multispecies relational anarchies. They try to understand and to live Donna Haraway’s Capitalocene/Chtulucene slogan: Make Kin Not Babies!, using Contact Improvisation as a field for exploring anticapitalist/ecological questions in movement.
Dorte Bjerre Jensen (DK)
Dorte Bjerre Jensen is a dancer/performer, researcher, teacher and organizer, and she is deeply interested in bodily movement and expression as an art form both in practice and in theory. As an artist she creates, direct and perform.
Dorte holds a 2-year postgraduate education for professional dancers: Dance partnership; research, performance/dance and facilitation, at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. Her final research project was in the frame of process philosophy and contact improvisation.
Furthermore Dorte is an educated school teacher, yoga teacher, Rosen Method therapist, Conscious Touch therapist.
She teaches contact improvisation nationally and internationally, in dance and acting schools, at festivals and in open workshops. She offers her work to professional dancers, actors, people in leadership roles, and to the general public.
Dorte is the author of two chapters: Contact improvisation and Dance & fight, in “Dans22”- bevægelse, koreografi og performance.
Dorte has also journeyed through life as a soccer player, martial artist (Taekwondo) and as a circus artist.
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As a dancer and teacher I am interested in our body ́s innate ability to respond physically to the environment and its ability to trust its own physical intelligence.
Our body creates space and is space, and it is in a constantly relational becoming and un-becoming while extending its skin out in space.
I am taking point of departure in my latest research: “Relational Fields” – touch and relation in the frame of process philosophy and contact improvisation:
“when I touch you, I reach toward the you that is constantly changing, I reach toward the you that you are becoming”.
With this focus on becoming (which is related to the unknowable, the unpredictable),
how can we address and get a grasp of the topics touch and relation within the context of contact improvisation?
Defne Erdur (TR/FR)
Defne Erdur is a dance artist and a sociologist working in the fields of performing arts, therapy and education. She is trained in Contemporary Dance (PhD), Sociology (MA), Intermodel Art Therapy & Creativity, Body Therapies (Deep Tissue Release, Trigger Point & Movement, Integrative Craniosacral Therapy), Meditation, and Trauma Healing (Somatic Experiencing). She is the co-founder and editor of idocde.net.
In 2016 she completed her PhD thesis in Turkey (DANCE EDUCATION ON THE TRANSITIVE LINE BETWEEN LIFE AND ART: Contributions of the Technique, Methodology and Pedagogy of Contact Improvisation to the Physical, Artistic and Psycho-social Development of Amateur Dancers). In 2017 she co-published mindthedance.com: A Guide/Movement to Document Contemporary Dance/ Movement Teaching, as an outcome of the REFLEX Europe Project.
Besides her private practice, she had been regularly teaching at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, MSGSU Istanbul State Conservatory, CI-Turkey, ElimSende and ÇATI Associations. She also gives her workshops (Hunting Gathering Cultivating, Every Body Knows, Mind the Body, and Embodying Time) around the world (Tanzhaus Zurich, Konservatorium Wien, Mandala İstanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Vienna, Berlin and Freiburg CI Festivals…), working with different populations (professional and amateur movers, therapists, women, and migrant children and youth).
Her movement teaching practice is mostly informed by her intensive trainings with Simone Forti, Julyen Hamilton, John Britton, Nancy Stark Smith, Daniel Lepkoff, Kirstie Simson, Nita Little, Frey Faust, Keith Hennessy, Aydın Teker, Marcia Plevin and Julia Buckroyd. Today, she continues her quest within Body Mind Centering, Axis Syllabus and Integral Somatic Psychology studies.
Corinne Skaff (LB)
Corinne Skaff is a Lebanese dance artist, teacher and organizer.
Trained In contemporary dance and theater, her main interest as pedagogue is to facilitate a holistic experience of learning: one that engages and stimulates the learner on the physical, emotional, social and intellectual level.
She approaches and proposes Contact Improvisation as a resourceful practice of self-embodiment.
An active member of the Dance and CI communities In Beirut. She hosts and organizes the 1st Lebanese and Arab CI festival, ContactCampBeirut.
