CI36 Training Intensive Teachers
Complete schedule and class descriptions. (Most of the Training Intensive Teachers will be joining us at the CI36 Celebration as well.)
Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood is a leading international teacher, performer and creator in the field of instantaneous choreography and contact improvisation since 1975. He is the artistic director of AH HA Productions, a project oriented company based in Montreal. Andrew studied, taught and performed with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and Nita Little, the founding members Contact Improvisation. He also has extensive practice in gymnastics, yoga, modern dance, release technique, compositional improvisation and Aikido. His work has been presented in numerous international festivals since 1980. Andrew danced for the companies of Fulcrum, Jo Lechay, Marie Chouinard and Jean-Pierre Perreault, and continues to collaborate with the Echo Case yearly. He has also collaborated in performance with Peter Bingham, Marc Boivin, Chris Aiken, Kirstie Simson, Ray Chung, Lisa Nelson, Benoit Lachambre, Marc Thompkins, and Ginette Laurin among many others. He is the recipient of the Canada Council’s Jacqueline-Lemieux award for the year 2000.
Benno Voorham is a dance improviser, choreographer and teacher from Holland, living in Stockholm since 1995. Since he graduated from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam he has worked internationally as a free-lance dance-artist, directing his own work as well as collaborating with others in both set and improvised pieces. He is a permanent member of the Greek political dance-theatre company ‘Wrong Movement’ and has worked at the City Theatre of Stockholm as a physical actor. In both his teaching and performance work, he is interested in exploring the creative, narrative potentials of the human body in motion. Benno has been a major force in introducing CI to many of the Eastern European countries. In 1997 he founded LAVA-Dansproduktion together with Sybrig Dokter.
Martin Hughes began dancing in the 1980s and spent ten years performing with dance and theatre companies in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. Somewhere in the middle of all that he decided to give up dancing but discovered Contact Improvisation and, as a result, is still dancing and loving it! After three years overseas, including two in NYC, Martin returned to Australia in the early 90s and founded State of Flux with other dancers in Melbourne. With them he has helped develop the Contact community in Australia, establishing the Melbourne Jam, running residential jams and teaching and performing Contact throughout Australia. In 1997, Martin and his wife, Fiona Cook, opened Cecil Street Studio as an independent dance venue in Melbourne. He has taught and performed Contact in Australia, New Zealand and Korea and teaches regularly in university dance courses across Australia.
Originally an Olympic gymnast in the 1960s, Mary Prestidge's first professional work was with the English dance company, Ballet Rambert as a contemporary dancer. In the mid-‘70s she co-founded the radical X6 Dance Space and its successor Chisenhale Dance Space, in London, and was a member of both artist collectives until 1989. These organizations provided an important context for the research and development of new dance forms and practices in Britain during that period. Mary has been an influential practitioner and teacher of new and experimental dance in both the independent dance scene as well as the specialist academy. She continues to evolve new work through collaboration with other artists and art forms in a variety of performing contexts. Mary has been a lecturer in dance at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts since 1995. "My interest in Contact Improvisation started through the need to move away from traditional methods of learning about moving and dancing and to open up more possibilities for myself as a dancer. CI was an important part of that process and continues to be so. Steve Paxton and Mary Fulkerson O'Donnell were my first teachers in an area of work which has nourished and sustained me for over 30 years."
Nancy Stark Smith first trained as an athlete and gymnast, leading her to study and perform modern and postmodern dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by the dance/theater improvisation group the Grand Union and the Judson Dance Theater breakthroughs of the 1960s in NYC. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in dance and writing. In 1972, she danced in the first performances of Contact Improvisation in NYC and has since been central to its development as a dancer, teacher, performer, organizer, and writer/publisher, working extensively over the years with Steve Paxton and others. She travels throughout the world teaching and performing contact and other improvised dance work at festivals, schools, and art centers, working with many favorite dance partners and performance makers including Karen Nelson, Andrew Harwood, Julyen Hamilton, and musician Mike Vargas.
Contact Improvisation has been integral to Nina Martin's creative practice for thirty years. Her investigations into CI have spawned rich research into dance for the solo, duet, and ensemble body. Performance credits include David Gordon Pick-Up Company, Mary Overlie, Deborah Hay, Martha Clarke, Simone Forti, Channel Z (Daniel Lepkoff, Stephen Petronio, Randy Warshaw, Diane Madden, and Robin Feld), Locktime (Jennifer Keller, Johanna Meyer, and Alexandra Hartmann) and Lower Left Performance Collective (Margaret Paek, Andrew Wass, Karen Schaffman, Kelly Dalrymple, Alicia Marvan, and Rebecca Bryant, etc.). Nina danced in the PBS Dance in America Beyond the Mainstream television program which featured Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, and Lisa Nelson and others. She was a founding member of Channel Z (NYC), New York Dance Intensive, and Lower Left (San Diego), and presently is a board member and a director of Marfa Live Arts, which sponsors Lower Left in virtual and physical space as well as hosts the March 2 Marfa PerformanceLab and Dance Ranch Marfa workshops in the Wild West of Texas. Martin has received funding for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts through six choreography fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Joyce-Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Meet the Composer/ Choreographer Grant, James Irvine Foundation (CA), Texas Commission on the Arts, and others. Currently, she carves out a dance destination in Marfa, TX, and is theorizing the social aspect of improvisational practices which include the teacher, student, performer, ensemble, and the audience, in a low residency PhD program at Texas Woman's University. She completed studies for the Master of Fine Arts in Dance at TWU in May 2008 and will be on faculty at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas starting in August 2008.
Nita Little develops, choreographs, performs, and teaches improvisational dance, and has for the past thirty-six years. She participated in the early explorations that became Contact Improvisation in 1972. With Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and others she introduced CI throughout the USA. She has been part of its emergence ever since. Through CI she discovered her abiding interest in the evolution of consciousness and the mind/body continuum. She has taught the Mind in Motion, an evolving movement syllabus, since the early eighties. Nita’s choreographic awards are from the NEA, California Arts Council and Dance USA. Both as faculty and guest artist she teaches nationally and internationally at schools, universities and festivals including, The Side Step Festival, Helsinki; ImPulsTanz, Vienna; The International Contact Festival, Freiburg; Kontakt Budapest International Festival and SFADI, Seattle. Nita has former students all over the world who are master dancers and teachers of dance and Contact Improvisation.
Ray Chung is a performer, teacher, and engineer,who has worked with Contact Improvisation and improvisation since 1979. He uses Contact Improvisation as part of improvisational performance practice and integrates other movement forms into his work, including martial arts, bodywork and Authentic Movement. He regularly collaborates with dancers, musicians, and other artists and has worked with Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Peter Bingham, Chris Aiken, and others. Ray's work has been featured at numerous national and international dance venues and festivals. He currently resides in San Francisco, California and regularly travels abroad to teach and perform.