CLASS DESCRIPTION
Contemporary Technique class
Ori's class encourages students to increase their movement possibilities and take risks in dancing by maximizing the benefits of the warmed-up body. The warm-up moves smoothly from floor to standing with a strong focus on anatomy to strengthen connections of correct alignment with an increase of fluidity in the joints.. Dancers will develop an understanding of the connections between their body and the floor, and will learn how to use momentum and breath to explore full dancing with the least amount of muscular tension.
During phrase work, dancers will learn how to incorporate information from the warm-up to execute more complicated sequences, and attention will be paid to controlling the use of breath to maintain a strong center from which one can explode into the space.
Ori is known to approach his class as a dialogue with the dancers and include the use of imagery and humor to allow the dancers to relate personally to the given material and find their own voice through the experience in class.
OTHER WORKSHOPS
The energetic body through dance and meridians
Our dancing body is charged with energy and its continuous flow is essential to maintain a balanced and a healthy state of being.
In Eastern Philosophy the energy is expressed through pathways known as Meridians which are divided into five elements – Earth, Water, Wood , Metal and Fire.
Each element is expressed through different qualities which we experience throughout our daily life.
In this workshop we will explore the different elements, their qualities and how they are being expressed through the dancing body.
We will explore and follow the physical location of the meridians on the body and practice how to balance the energy through body work technique (shiatsu), partnering and stretching.
We will continue to affect the energy through the moving body using imagery and improvisation as an integral part of the warm up leading us to explore full out dancing and build up into dance vocabulary.
This exploration will encourage dancers to discover the five elements within them and how to take advantage of those qualities through the awareness of the meridians.
The goal is to find a sense of abundant in our dancing while feeling strong and balanced.
Composition and Rep / the individual and the group
This workshop will focus on working with set movement material and learning how to maximize the use of it within the context of a solo or in group work.
The dancers will learn a few movement phrases to which they will add their own variations according to different tasks and challenges presented in the workshop. After developing solo interpetations from the given material, each dancer will then use this work to then set it on a small group of dancers. This will be done through compositional tasks as well as through some improvisational exercises. The goal is to notice and recognize the differences and possibilities of each option when making compositional choices.
Breaking forms
The aim of this workshop is to arrive at a new place of improvisational
possibilities from an original shared vocabulary of movement and phrasing.
At start participants will learn a dance phrase that will become a physical departure or investigative resource for later
improvisational work. The phrase will be slightly quirky, demanding,
dynamic and articulate. participants will learn how to work
with the use of momentum, gravity and softness in the joints,in order to find clarity in their movement in space.
After the phrasing is explored and digested, participants will work
individually or in small groups to begin manipulating this shared
movement material. To illicit new possibilities, different tasks to support
improvisations will be given; some will be strict and precise and others loose with room for individual interpretation.
Starting with a strong base and a focus on details, participants will work with a wide variety of improvisation to explore their interpretative abilities.
Dance and Memory
This workshop physically explores what memory is, the ways that we remember, and what it is that we remember. Through investigating the personally interpretative and often conflicting nature of memories and how they inspire and influence us, the use of conceptual motivations for movement composition
will be introduced.
Structured improvisational tasks, memory games, and using individual memories to devise solutions to movement problems will be some of the methods utilized as an impetus to generate new movement based on memory.
The influences, emotional contexts and dynamic effects that the memory tasks produce are further explored through manipulating taught dance phrase material with the newly discovered ideas in mind.
Space and Time
Based on a framework of core dance phrase material, the elements of spatial placement and timing will be explored as tools to manipulate and organize movement.
The workshop will investigate how base material is changed according to the consideration of its placement in space, its placement in relation to space and other people/the environment, and its spatial placement according to movement execution in differing time frames.
These content-based investigations will illustrate the crucial and dynamic effects that an awareness of spatial placement and timing can contribute to movement composition.
Through changing the instructions and directions of how to execute the phrase material, the students will gain an understanding of physical and aesthetic choices. Challenging their own physical actions with timing and 3-dimensional spatial tasks will introduce them to methods of personalizing existing material by making different choices of how they will perform it.
From the investigations, the students will be encouraged to develop their own choices to reinvent the core material. This workshop offers the students the opportunity to participate both physically and as observers making evaluations of the process.