Contact Improv Dance Workshop Aug. 7-13, 2011

Instructors: John Faichney & Eryn Dace Trudell

Arrive Sunday Aug7 for dinner and orientation and the first evening jam. Workshop begins Monday morning at 10am and continues through Friday, ending after breakfast on Saturday Aug13. Participants are welcome to arrive early and stay late.

$450 includes tuition, all meals, camping and transportation on Lasqueti.
Childcare provided-$100 per child 5-12yrs old
Please contact us to register.

In John’s class we will focus on cultivating and refining single-point contact with a partner – that is, on channelling all useful awareness of partner location and impetus through a single-point touch-pathway. This will include working-through the difficulties and deadlocks (physical, but also interpretive) of single-point touch – for example, the temptation to turn rolling, contiguous touch into sliding or dis-contiguous or multi-point touch. From this baseline, we will take-up more context-oriented tactics – for example, resisting, exceeding, and pivoting against our partner’s movement initiatives – opening onto a vision of CI as a ‘both-parties-speaking’ conversation formed out of identifiable trajectories of movement over the surface of the body. Some of the exercises will exploit game-like and/or martial-arts-like structures. In every case, we will re-discover CI as a touch-based dialogue oriented, by choice, to the problem of taking and re-interpreting initiative in any of its expressions.

Eryn’s classes provide somatic and athletic tools by combining modern dance techniques with Skinner Releasing Technique to prepare the physical self to be available and capable of being carried into a dance by what is present. Multi-directional awareness, multidimensional alignment, softening and letting go into states of non-compression and freedom. In solos, groups, couples and trios, we will harness the power that comes from practicing suppleness and trust to enable a deepening into buoyancy, risk and playful celebration of the human body in contact.

John Faichney (http://www.personae.com) has practised Contact Improvisation for more than three decades, since the form’s inception. With Anne Cooper, he taught the 2010 Lasqueti Workshop and Jam.

Eryn Dace Trudell is a dance artist: producer, choreographer, dancer and teacher originally from Toronto, now living in Montreal. Experienced in all aspects of dance creation from the idea to the stage, her versatile career includes choreography, commissions and collaborations of many varieties.

*Honouring the body conscious, Trudell teaches kinaesthetic awareness through dancing as an ingredient to boosting self-confidence, motivating energy and maintaining good health? physically, emotionally and psychologically. Her classes speak to the body itself, suggesting ways that
movement can free us from unconscious patterns, to enhance our thinking and creativity, animal grace, social availability, cultural empathy, and genuine pleasure in being: a state of innate wisdom and freedom. *

Trudell’s students include professional and non-professional adult dancers, educators, children, and parents and children. She particularly enjoys inclusive dance practices, which ignite community spirit through artistic physical exploration. Since the birth of her first child, and the founding of *Mama dances!* in 2006 she has been exploring and illuminating the
physical relationship and the spontaneous events that transpire between mother and child in the dance studio, inspiring a post natal activity boom in Montreal.

Trudell holds a BFA from Juilliard and Teachers’ Certification in Skinner Releasing Technique. She is a an active member of ACI (Association of Contact Improvisation of Montréal), RQD, CAEA, CDA. She is deeply dedicated to the development of Contact Improvisation. Her teachers include Andrew de Lotbiniére Harwood, Peter Bingham, Chris Aiken, Ray Chung, Daniel Lepkoff, Nancy Stark Smith, Benno Vorham and Martin Keogh along with many years of jamming. She is presently living the dance everyday.

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