Contact Improvisation, The Underscore and Being Ready to Dance
Taught by Juliet Shelley
Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th April 2024
10am to 5pm
Dance Studio, St Werburghs Primary School
James St, St Werburgh’s, Avon, Bristol BS2 9US

£70 Early bird before 1st March, £80 concession, £90 full price

ONE DAY TICKETS FOR SATURDAY NOW AVAILABLE: £40 concession, £45 full price.

Email info@contactdance.co.uk

In this workshop Juliet teaches contact improvisation techniques and skills which will introduce participants to the physical material and vocabulary of the improvisation score by Nancy Stark Smithe entitled ‘The Underscore’.

Juliet will also teach ways of how to be fully available in the dancing of Contact Improvisation by actively incorporating seeing and hearing as part of and alongside the physical and sensory information and vocabulary within this form. This practice opens up a large range of compositional choices and options to the dancer by drawing on an integrated, rich level of resources and responses available in each moment whilst dancing Contact with a partner. In the second part of the workshop, Juliet leads participants through the Underscore.

Participants can apply the vocabularies from the first part into practicing and dancing the Underscore. They can learn and experience a specific scored ensemble framework within which they can dance contact improvisation and they can expand their dancing into a deeper practice both through the framework of the Underscore and by accessing and incorporating a wide range of choices, flavours and colours into their dancing.

For all levels of experience.

Juliet Shelley is a dancer, choreographer and performer currently residing in Paris, France. She is also a teacher of the Alexander technique and Pilates. She has been teaching Contact Improvisation since 1987.

Her teachers include Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, Kirstie Simson, Chris Aiken and Martin Keogh. She has taught classes and workshops in the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, the USA, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia.

She began dancing Contact Improvisation in London following her graduation from the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in 1983 and continued at the Centre for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.

She attended the first two European Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchanges in Angers, France and Berlin, Germany and attended the 25th Anniversary of Contact Improvisation in Oberlin, Ohio in 1997.

In 2000 she attended an Intensive three week training with Nancy Stark Smith at Earthdance in the USA and in 2012 she was invited to the Extended Underscore workgroup with Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas in London, a seven day in depth practice and study of the Underscore with thirty participants.

https://motionbeing.com/dance/contact-improvisation/
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