What moves us, what images or ideas inspire us, and how do we give them physical form? In this course, you will explore how to translate an experience, image, idea or text into movement. Here, dance is not the goal, but a means of expressing what is going on inside you. You connect creative thinking with physical expression and embodied experience.
The dance studio functions as a research space and a platform for personal and collective exploration, practice, courage and learning. In class, you build a connection between brain and body. As Austin Kleon describes in Steal Like an Artist:
“Our nerves aren’t a one-way street—our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains tell our bodies.”
You move, explore and discover your own movement patterns and develop a personal dance vocabulary. The focus is not on technical dancing, but on deepening your own movement language.
What will you be doing?
Over the course of ten weeks, you will investigate how to give physical form to various themes. Each lesson begins with a visual or textual source of inspiration. Through guided dance tasks, you will explore your own expressive potential in movement. You will receive tools, prompts and input to help develop and deepen your personal dance language.
Each week, the focus will be on one of the core elements that make up dance: the body, space, time, and dynamics. These frameworks offer structure within which you can find freedom and depth. You will explore both the inner and outer world of your physical body (embodiment).
The lessons are structured in three parts: a warm-up, an exploratory phase, and a final phase in which you arrive at an optimal creative dance process. The emphasis is on the process itself; dance research is never truly finished. As the course progresses, you are welcome to bring in your own ideas or sources of inspiration for further exploration. There is space for this during the second half of the course.
