MOVING THE ENVIRONMENT:MAKING DANCES FROM THE PROCESS OF LIVING MOVEMENT
| Photo by: Fabrice Beauvois Ardeche, France |
Practice (2013) Solos: Daniel Lepkoff & Sakura Shimada Par ici las danse - Festival |
Led by: Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada.
This workshop presents practical tools for a way of dancing that is based on researching how our body functions, how we interact physically with the environment, and how our perceptions and imagination act through our body to expresses our understandings and desires.
The work can be applied to improvisation, performance, contact, and healing.
Jams every evening.
Concepts and technical practices include:
- The movement of attention.
- Inside simple patterns: rolling, walking, crawling, running, and jumping.
- Body waves.
- Force and architecture
- Vision.
- Space as a part of our body
- Stillness
- Beginnings and endings
Some questions about dancing
- How do we prepare for dancing?
- What is ordinary movement? How do we learn from our environment?
- How can we move our attention to create new perceptions and understandings?
- What is an image? Who creates it? Where is it? What is being an image? What is letting go of an image?
- What is dance? What is culture?
Exercises are drawn from Contact Improvisation, Anatomical Releasing Technique, Feldenkrais, explorations in Contemporary Dance, the ongoing movement research of dancers Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, and collaboration with artists Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Simone Forti, Paul Langland, Oleg Soulimenko, and others. This work is the base for Daniel and Sakura's creative work and performing practice.
Short Biographies
Beginning in the early '70's Daniel Lepkoff played a central role in the development of Release Technique with John Rolland and Mary Fulkerson, and Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. Through workshops, collaborations, performance projects, and personal movement research, Daniel has continued to expand and deepen this functional approach to movement research. As a performer he is known for composing dances that arises from the process of living movement; as a teacher for his imagination and continual invention of original techniques, making direct contact with information and pursuing his own research and questions together with students. His work looks at movement from life, a vision of living in an ongoing spontaneous physical dialogue with the environment. His approach explores the form and composition of these interactions. He is one of the founders of Movement Research in NYC.
Sakura Shimada is from Japan, currently she lives in Vermont. In Japan, she studied Modern Dance, Ballet, Jazz, and Japanese Fusion dance. She moved to New York City in 1997 and
studied at the Martha Graham Contemporary Dance school, Dance Space Center, Movement Research and presented her own works.
She was an Artist Residency at Movement Research in 2008. She began working with Daniel Lepkoff in 2001, engaging deeply with his work, co-teaching and
traveling internationally. Her improvisation practice is strongly
focused on body information and observation of body mind connection with movement.
She is a certified teacher of DanceAbility, completing the training with Alito Alessi in Bogota in 2012.
In 2013 she began The Feldenkrais teacher training in NYC.