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Lee Su-Feh

The Mystery of Making Dance

February 25th and 26th of 2012

10:00 am to 4:30 pm

Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement

Scotiabank Studio Theatre

6 Noble Street

Full price $150 • Early bird $75 to $135

(with $25 non-refundable deposit by January 24th)

To register contact Tracey - atc@series808.ca

Level of Participants: Participants do not need to be professionally trained or even able-bodied, but must have the capacity to focus and concentrate for extended periods of time. The work is not "technically" difficult but is nevertheless, demanding and rigorous. This workshop is for professional dancers, actors, musicians as well as for people who just want to spend time with their bodies, moving and who have an interest in creating work. Participants may choose to take only the technique class.

Do you have an existing piece (or section of a piece) that you want to interrogate?

Do you have a work-in-progress that you want to develop?

Do you not have a piece but only an inkling that there is one somewhere inside you and you want to find a way towards it?

Making dance is a strange and mysterious process and this workshop does not pretend to provide an answer. We will, however, share tools to explore and nurture impulses, consider the gaze of both artist and audience, and delve into the complexities of composing with time, space and the human body as best as we can.

This workshop will consist of a technique class in the morning, followed by an afternoon session that explores composition and creation.

Using a somatic approach, the technique class proposes that through an inquiry into sensation, we can discover and map out the spaces in and around the body to reveal a space that is sentient and in partnership with the body. The work uses breath and imagery – twin tools found in both contemporary somatic techniques as well as traditional qigong methods – to address resistances and blockages while honoring the interconnectedness of the whole body. Special attention is placed on the role and function of curves and spirals, as both strategy and landscape of the dancing body. Participants can expect a range of experiences – from simply lying on the floor breathing, to more formal qigong exercises – to take them into a dance that comes merely from observing the sensations in their body and adjusting with and around those sensations.

Extrapolating from these principles, the afternoons will be spent exploring the creative process as an experience of the whole body – thinking, feeling, observing, adjusting.

Lee Su-Feh is a choreographer, dancer and dramaturge. Born and raised in Malaysia, she started performing in the National Children's Theatre (1980-82) where she was introduced to a range of practices, from traditional South-East Asian performance forms to more contemporary and experimental techniques and ideas. In 1985 she moved to Paris to study contemporary dance. Since 1987 she has trained extensively in Chinese martial arts with an emphasis on the internal systems and presently studies Baguazhang. Currently based in Vancouver, she is Artistic Director of battery opera, whose award-winning work interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and practices.