Contact Improvisation Dance Camp
with Dorte Bjerre Jensen and Malcolm Manning
- Do you want to immerse yourself in CI for a week?
- Looking for something more relaxed and intimate than a festival?
- Want to be challenged to learn new skills and expand the boundaries of possibilities of your dancing?
- Like to jam with people you know with focus on dancing together in a clear time frame?
Come for a week-long dance camp in the beautiful and intimate surroundings of Druna studios in Prague with Dorte Bjerre Jensen and Malcolm Manning, two extraordinary teachers with complementary and contrasting styles and personalities, connected by their common passion for contact improvisation.
In a group of no more than 35 people, there will time and space to get to know each other, to build a shared understanding in which we can respectfully and safely explore our various interests in CI.
The basic structure of the week will be to work in the mornings on contact improvisation skills which will be lead by Dorte, and in the afternoons Malcolm will facilitate a process of dancing together that he has developed out of Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore.
We will also offer regular strengthening training, Feldenkrais classes, an film evening with lecture and discussion, and of course open studio time.
Dorte – Animal-inspired movement exploration
Contact improvisation is a dynamic dance-form that embraces playfulness, develops technical and sensory skills, leads to both mild and wild improvisations, and offers a path towards constant development and challenge.
Right now in my teaching, I’m very inspired by animals. I love their movement, something that is so clearly essential to their being and survival. The qualities that inspire me are their playfulness, clarity of intention, readiness and listening through the whole body.
In this class, we will shake off our stiff human movement for a moment, and dive into the creatures that we are. It’s not about mimicking a specific animal, it’s more about exploring how this animal-inspired movement influences our mind and physicality.
It’ll be fun, challenging, creative and hopefully it will inspire us to use our bodies in a new way!
Malcolm – Chaotic Choreographies : Navigating The Jam
Technical skills to improvise in contact with others is one part of the big CI picture. A whole other layer of challenge presents itself in jamming. How do we negotiate our way through a room full of people with different bodies, histories, backgrounds, cultures and interests, all moving together?
The jumping off point for us will be Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore. I’ll share my personal perspective and exercises developed from 21 years of working with the score in its various incarnations: forever interrogating it, reformulating it, adapting it, playing with it, twisting it, infusing it with my own interests.
I’m particularly interested in how group intelligence manifests itself as we practice jamming as a group. We’ll work on cultivating the ability to recognise and follow our own interests while staying connected and open to what’s happening the for others.
Through sharing our insights and interests, we’ll develop our jamming as a rich and safe container to integrate out CI skills, explore ourselves and meet others through dancing together.
DORTE BJERRE JENSEN (DK)
Moving moves me. It´s the life force within me and around me.
Dorte is known for creating a welcoming and heartful atmosphere in her classes where she presents her dynamic and powerful approach to CI. She grounds this in her ability listen to the body based rooted in her private practice in therapeutic bodywork.
She is educated as a school teacher, yoga teacher, Rosen Method® therapist and Conscious Touch® therapist and has accumulated many years of teaching experience in a wide range of different disciplines and contexts. She has studied a range of somatic and contemporary dance practices.
She teaches regular CI classes at educational institutions in Denmark including the contemporary dance department of the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She is the managing director of the annual CI MIniFestival Copenhagen and on the board the CI-Copenhagen collective.
Besides working as a teacher, dancer and performer, she has also journeyed through life as a soccer player, tree climber, gymnast, and martial artist (Tae kwon Do) and mother.
MALCOLM MANNING (UK)
Malcolm is known as a somatic movement researcher and educator in the fields of contemporary dance and contact improvisation. He brings a wealth of experience and creative thinking to his innovative classes. His teaching is clear and inspiring, and permeated throughout with easeful humour.
He discovered CI and Feldenkrais in 1991 and has been working with them ever since. He first studied with Nancy Stark Smith in 1994 and participated regularly in her workshops in the 1990s and early 2000s during her development of what later she named as the Underscore.
He teaches at universities, contemporary dance centres and festivals, and co-founded the Dance And Somatics course at ISLO in Finland. He also developed a body of work called work BodySchool for the general public in which applies somatic and contemporary dance practices to everyday life situations.
He has studied a range of somatic and contemporary dance practices and is certified as a practitioner of both the Feldenkrais Method® and Body And Earth®. He studied for two years at SNDO Amsterdam, has an MA in dance pedagogy from the Theatre Academy Of Finland.
for more info and booking visit www.druna.cz
