Dance
- Dance at its best is a fully sensed and felt through physical activity. Our senses and sensibility are a wunderful tool to modify movement with ease and skillfullness. Stll it demands from the dancer a continuous exchange of information between physical knowldedge that is already embodied and a conscious perceptual inquiry. The challenge is to keep the process of perception continuous and to focus on the quality of movements rather than just the quantity. And without an awake focus on our sensations, this process gets easily blocked.
In a dance training/class my aim is to maintain a focus on our awareness and our sensory-motor abilities according to which the body functions in the world - rather than on static forms and images. We like to become aware of different body textures and movement qualitites and to sharpen our sensations, while we face exposure to movement. Principles of different dance techniques help to achieve it and are in my view an essential tools for a teacher.
The beginning of a class focuses on activating our sensory-motor abilities, softening the joints of the body and building new inner pathways. The fluid quality of the body shall faciliate multi-directional balancing and help to release our alignment.
Mobilizing exercises to stretch & strenghten are combined with structured improvisation tasks, which encourage each participant to approach movement on an individual level and offer space for individual movement exploration and musicality.
A sensations for flow, liquid quality and elasticity in the musculoskeletal structure of the body becomes visible and space in the joints noticed.
- Following the warm-up, I gradually focus on more energetic and technical tasks. The class increases in complexity involving set sequences and short choreographic phrases, expanding the dynamic possibilities of moving. We move through different spatial levels - from the floor up into medium and upright positions and down again.
We use spirals, shifting weight, turns and jumps as well as moving through space (locomotion). By staying attentive to our sensory abilities, movements become alive. To create dance becomes infinite and rich, understanding that form is a matter of sensing its sources of action.
The class integrates elements of various different dance techniques. I am combining principles of different contemporary dance techniques (floor work, release technique), modern dance techniques (Limon, Jooss-Leeder-Technik) as well as contact improvisation, improvisation methods and body work (Feldenkrais).
I use my imagination as a source to help students to convey how to work with the information that is sensed and to direct it. It is an essential tool for a dancer's creativity, to master this ability to shape the grace of the art. The class aims to bring a higher sense for different textures, dynamics and movement qualities and to embody reflection. We research musicality and artistry and keep switching between opposed qualities such as fragility/power or smoothness/sharpness.
