Dance Improvisation Practices that offer Resilience and Support in Difficult Times

SomaHut workshop with

KIRSTIE SIMSON

Zagreb 25-27 October 2024

Kirstie draws from her extensive experience of Contact Improvisation, dance techniques, the Alexander technique, Aikido, meditation, and her broad knowledge of improvisation in performance. She shares her work through facilitated exercises, open time for play and exploration, movement scores, observations, discussion, and humour. Much of the work is experienced through partnering and connection with others, balanced with solo time for processing and reflection.

There is deep inspiration and rigor in a practice of improvisation that posits vulnerability at its heart. Developing the skills to be able to care for, engage, respect, and respond to that state of openness in oneself, others and our environment generates creative work that is powerful and transformative. Learning from a place of interconnectedness can give us the resilience and insight to face into life’s challenges and complexities. In this workshop Kirstie shares the movement practices and underlying philosophies she has developed over forty years of her committed involvement with dance improvisation as a ‘life-practice’ that has helped her negotiate life’s ups and downs, including a life-threatening illness in 2020. Integral with the physical practices she will elucidate how she sees embodied practices as vitally important for developing the resilience to face into and respond to the challenging times we are living through.

This workshop will give participants the opportunity to delve deeply into the wisdom embedded within embodied practices. Kirstie will facilitate the work, guided by her own depth of body-knowing gleaned over the years in which she has pursued a dedicated practice of listening, inquiry and belief in the importance of life-affirming embodied knowledge.

Kirstie Simson (UK) has been a continuous explosion in the contemporary dance scene, bringing audiences into contact with the vitality of pure creation in moment after moment of virtuoso improvisation. Called “a force of nature” by the New York Times, she is an award-winning performer and teacher who has “immeasurably enriched and expanded the boundaries of New Dance” according to Time Out Magazine, London. Kirstie is internationally renowned today as an excellent teacher, a captivating performer, and a leading light in the field of Dance Improvisation, with a dance practice that spans over four decades. From 2008 – 2020 Kirstie held a position as a tenured professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois.
In August 2020 Kirstie returned to her home base in Wales from where she continues to share her work internationally. Kirstie frames her work now, in the light of our uncertain future, as practices that can help us develop resilience in the face of challenge. She uses her own experience of facing a life-threatening health issue in 2020/2023 as a foundation for her ongoing research into the power of embodied intelligence.
www.kirstiesimson.com

To register please write to:
somahut.mmk@gmail.com

In case we do not know you, please write a sentence about yourself and your dance /movement experience.

TIME
25/10 – 27/10 2024

Friday, 25/10,  6.30 – 9 pm

Saturday, 26/10 1-5 pm

Sunday, 27/10 1-5 pm

FEE
160 eur

120 eur  earlybird till 5th of October

If money is the limiting factor, contact us at somahut.mmk@gmail.com

VENUE
Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb

Frankopanska 22

Graphic design: Vanja Cuculić / Studio Cuculić
Photo: Nina Đurđević

This workshop is organized as part of SomaHut 2024 program, produced by Multimedia Hut / Multimedijalna koliba in partnership with University of Zagreb – Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb and supported by the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.