[CI-Announce] Workshop K.J. HOLMES "Contact Impro Performance BMC", Berlin, 30.6.-4.7.09

[J.B.]

K.J. HOLMES  Workshop: Contact Impro Performance BMC

Workshop: 30.6.– 4.7.09, daily 11:00–16:00Showing / Performance:  
Friday, 3.7. + Saturday 4.7.: 19:00

K.J. Holmes is an independent dance artist, singer and actor who has  
been exploring improvisation as process and performance since 1981.  
She teaches, choreographs and performs at festivals and universities  
throughout the world, as a soloist and in collaborations with artists  
such as Simone Forti, Image Lab (Lisa Nelson, Karen Nelson, Scott  
Smith) and in the work of Steve Paxton. Her influences include Contact  
Improvisation, BMC, Yoga (certified teacher 2007), Authentic movement,  
Ideokinesis, Alexander and Feldenkrais techniques, Martial Dance,  
world vocal studies and contemporary dance and theater. A 1999  
graduate of the School for BMC, K.J. is adjunct faculty at New York  
University Experimental Theater Wing, is an ongoing teacher Movement  
Research NYC and has a private practice in Dynamic Alignment and Re- 
integration in Brooklyn, N.Y. where she lives. She just completed a  
two year acting training in the Sanford Meisner acting technique at  
the William Esper Studio in New York City and is developing an evening  
length piece entitled.

Morning Class „The Athletics of Intimacy“ will combine skills and  
applications of Body-Mind Centering (BMC), with skills and practices  
of Contact Improvisation to fine tune and engage the imagination of  
the dancer in solo, duet and ensemble play. The class will explore  
musicality and phrasing, the learning of specific lifts and rolls as  
well as how we craft time and space becoming more tuned to center and  
subtleties of touch, direction and intention. Skills will include  
release techniques and experiential anatomy to better understand the  
mechanics of the body, and developmental patternings, body puzzles,  
and forms that shape the body and space with odd timings and unusual  
perspectives to create dances that are dynamic and alive in the  
moment. We will learn more about the interior of the body and and our  
ideas and find pathways to external space, time and place. discovering  
new challenges and risks in our movement vocabulary.

Afternoon Class „Improvisation – Performance as Exposure“: The  
training of Contact Improvisation is a physical practice that includes  
increasing range of motion, awakening awareness and clarifying  
intention. We learn through kinetic feedback with another as well as  
through exploring different patterns of movement and how all of our  
senses lead us into dancing. Touch is not enough. Preparing to perform  
requires more than awareness, it asks us to be seen and to see. In  
this workshop, we will focus on meeting truthfully and directly the  
unexpected. Contact Improvisation will be our entrance into the  
physicality of our images and applications of BMC will fine tune us to  
the mechanics of our instruments - our bodies. Weight, mass and breath  
become movement, become landscape, become story, become question,  
become idea. We will play with heightening our senses and perceptions,  
amplifying our awareness to expose more of our interior, making the  
invisible visible to play with time and space. Witnessing, reading,  
writing and the voice will be used to further engage and enliven our  
imaginations and for discovering new challenges and risks. How do we  
ready ourselves for performing and who is the being in the body?

The workshop will culminate (if desired) in 2 evenings of performance.

Participation: 5 days 200 Euro
Registrations: Tel. +49-(0)30-47 36 35 00, Email: info at felixruckert.de
Place: Schwelle 7, Uferstraße 6, HH 1. OG (near Uferstudios), 13357  
Berlin-Wedding, Germany
Info: http://www.schwelle7.de/KJHOLMES.html