Falling Into Improvisation :Contact Dance as a Practice of Freedom
Sunday nights, 7-9pm.
Most classes at the Ottawa Dance Directive, 2 Daly Street in Downtown Ottawa. Some classes at the Flava Factory, 1076B Wellington Street W. in Hintonburg.
September 21 - ODD
September 28 - Flava Factory
October 5 - ODD
October 12 - No Class, Thanksgiving
October 19 - ODD
October 26 - Flava Factory
November 2 -ODD
November 9 - No class (Remembrance Day-adjacent)
November 16 - ODD
November 23 - Flava Factory
November 30 - ODD
December 7 - no class -contact dance Channukah/Christmas/Festivus/Solstice/Winter PARTY - details TBD
December 14 -ODD
December 21 - Flava Factory
Pre-register: 11 classes for $190.
Drop-in: $20/class.
e-transfer to:
Z3VsbGNyeWRhbmNlIHwgZ21haWwgISBjb20=
REGISTRATION FORM and student/teacher expectations(fill out once per term):
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUhz-APYULqRsh2bPXA0xH-fHcMWYlaupTztN2ql4GmH3nPA/viewform?usp=heade
See you in class!
The context for the practice in general is this: to experience Contact Improvisation as a rigorous but also extremely fun/interesting artform, one that meets a variety of needs hard to meet elsewhere: 1) a chance to explore deep, embodied habits of relating to self and other; 2) intellectual curiosity about the play of bodies in relation to space/gravity/other bodies; 3) an experiment in improvised touch in a container in which the intention is not to form romantic partnership, hence freeing touch from the expectation of pleasing/being pleased; 4) an artistic offering in which the creative act gets made then dissolved, over and over; 5) a chance to experience the ground of reality without the intervention of linguistic habits and in the presence of other bodies, hence facilitating deep but not dissociative meditative states; 6) just a really fun time to get weird with a group of others actually interested in something as radical and brave as improvising movement in close contact with other bodies.
The teacher: Kristen Lewis approaches contact dance as a vital way to uncover deep habits of the self in relation to other, and to remake those habits along more expansive, life-serving lines--done playfully, gently, with rigour, with discipline, and with style.
Her dance practice goes back to the early 1980s and 1990s in Halifax at Halifax Dance, the Halifax Ballet Theatre, and the Maritime Academy of Gymnastics/Nova Gold, evolved through various phases in the interim, including a period of intense practice and study on Salt Spring Island from 2010 to 2017, with immersion in the Laban work and the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Her choreograpic and performance art work has appeared in venues as diverse as: The Dance Centre and What Lab in Vancouver, All Saint's Church on Salt Spring Island, the Movement Studio at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C., the Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, ON, the Wall Street Bull (top of) in New York City, the Marine Venus monument in Halifax, N.S., the Alchemy Fest in Ottawa, and at the International Theatre Research Conference in Iceland (remotely via her colleague the late theatre artist Kit Danowski)--and points in between.
When not teaching Contact Improvisation, Kristen is either engaged in conversation with friends, meditating (big thanks to Chogyum Trungpa!), learning how to be a decent divorce lawyer, teaching ballet, studying martial arts, and, also, doing quite a bit of lounging, when possible.
Also check out other Workshops in Ottawa, Arts events in Ottawa, Theatre events in Ottawa.
