Creative Practice for Contemporary Dance
This six-day online workshop brings together emerging choreographers interested in broadening their understanding of choreographic thinking, and mid-career makers looking to refresh their practice in an environment of shared learning.
The goal of the workshop is to bring our intuitive knowledge and curiosity into an easy dialogue with our critical minds.
We will work in a spirit of rigour that makes space for lightness, play and empathy, while acknowledging the realities of the global pandemic and the intense debate taking place today around social justice issues. We will share our daily work with the group, giving and receiving thoughtful and mutually supportive feedback.
Creative Practice for Contemporary Dance will be guided by veteran choreographer and mentor Christopher House, formerly of Toronto Dance Theatre, with guest faculty.
What Does the Program Offer?
Taking advantage of both the restrictions and benefits of online art making, we will examine choreography as a continuum of actions, tactics and personal values that can be shared and developed by both choreographers and performers. All participants will compose and perform on a daily basis, working quickly and intuitively, and using the unique features of our current living situations to celebrate the artistic potential of limitations.
The program will make space for broader discussion on such as the ethics of representation; the pressure to innovate; the traps of self-sabotage; sharing authorship; and the social and political questions of this extraordinary moment in time.
We will refer to an evolving list of compositional considerations derived from disciplines such as cinema, music, architecture, literature, visual art, theatre, physics, biology and dance; participants are invited to add to and personalize this list in support of their own practice.
Learn more and apply online by visiting banffcentre.ca.
Areas of focus will include:
- Enhancing specificity
- Editing and distillation
- Adaptation and remix
- Working with found materials
- Developing written scores
- Choreographing with objects
- Relationships with sound and light
- Foreground/Background: Space as poetry
- Modes of counterpoint
- Expansion within limits
- Addressing anticipation
- Framing, mapping and navigating form
- Collaboration and directing
- Redefining virtuosity
A special online resource hub will serve as a place to share materials and collect questions and further observations on these and other topics. Participants will be encouraged to organize one-on-one or smaller group dialogues outside of the official meeting hours and to take advantage of the materials in the Resource Hub. The program director will be available for individual appointments throughout the workshop.
Who Should Apply?
This program is for emerging choreographers and performance-makers who are interested in increasing their compositional awareness and expanding their definition of dance, and for established movement artists looking to refresh their practice and reassess their assumptions.
The program is open to artists worldwide, inclusive of all gender identities, sexual orientations, race, creed, age, national origin, economic positions, or physical or mental abilities. ASL interpretation will be available for Deaf artists.
Participants must be able to commit to being present for the full duration of the workshop and be available for a thirty-minute conversation with lead faculty member Christopher House in advance.
Program Dates: June 14 – 19, 2021
Application Deadline: May 5, 2021
