Expanding the Range – A Week of Improvisational Workshops and Performances with Katherine Ferrier

Katherine Ferrier is a dance artist/educator, poet and visual artist and a master of improvising and making dances. She earned her BA in Dance and Women’s Studies from Middlebury College, and MFA in Dance and Performance from Sarah Lawrence College.
A co-founder of The Architects, an improvisational quartet with a collaborative performance history spanning nearly 20 years, she is also the founder and Artistic Director of Immediate Theatre, an ensemble of movers, musicians, video and visual artists, lighting and set designers, collaborating together to create spontaneous dance theater works. Her relaxed teaching style, continuous curiosity, and playful approach make working with her a combination of light joy-burst and deep soul-stretch. Please join any/all of the following workshops…and come out to watch Katherine perform with Tucson’s own improv performance dance group, Movement Salon.

WORKSHOPS (All classes $15, or all 3/$40 – cash or check payable to NEW ARTiculations)

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009 6:40-8:15pm The Dance Loft (www.thedanceloft.com) 620 E 19th St, Ste. 150
Playing Your Way into Making Work
This workshop offers some playful methods for creative research and proposes that the ongoing development of one’s choreographic voice reveals both continuity and a capacity for change. How do you investigate the vague sense; how do you pull on the first thread to unravel more raw materials? Also, how can you deepen poetic contact with your emerging material by finding ways to sneak up alongside it? As a result, how can you complexify, seek out other angles, or trick yourself into new modes of working and organizing? Class exercises in moving, writing, “brainstorming,” BODYstorming, mini-studies, and dialogues will offer some means of answering these questions.

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 5:30-7pm ZUZI (www.zuzimoveit.org) 738 N. 5th Ave
Holding Your Own by Letting Go of the Self: Inroads to Solo Improvisations
Who do we think we are? And what is to be gained by dropping the personal, physical, compositional and aesthetic assumptions we carry around? Can we dance our way into dropping the self with the small “s” while cultivating the courage to allow the more expansive big “S” Self to emerge? How can we maintain authenticity, risk-taking, and discovery while supporting the unfolding order, form, and through-line of the dance? Issues of character, narrative, metaphor and meaning will be physically questioned and investigated. Acknowledging and embracing those patterns and habits we call our “shtick” while working to move with, through and beyond them into unknown territory and artistic growth, this workshop pushes the edges of the solo form.

Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009 11-12:30 pm ZUZI (www.zuzimoveit.org) 738 N. 5th Ave
MOVING TO YOUR EDGE: Expanding the Range of Possibility
An intensive movement and text workshop in putting oneself “on edge,” by entering unfamiliar modes of moving, voicing, and responding. Exercises will include time for investigating and recognizing familiar choices, and will move toward tasks and games for thwarting habits. Improved self-perception combined with permission to move differently delivers each mover to the edge of familiar territory. With the support of the group, dancers will be invited to intentionally step out of bounds. Finally, modes of individual research will be translated to group forms, helping the ensemble to discover new dance territory together.

PERFORMANCES (with Movement Salon)

Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009
Spoken Word All Soul Poetry
7-10pm
Downtown Main Library Plaza
101 N. Stone Avenue
FREE

Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009
“The Moving Cafe”
8-9pm
Tooley’s Cafe on Congress St.
(Congress and 5th Ave.)
FREE
Sunday, Nov. 15, 2009
“What We Did/Do”
1:30-2:30 pm
Rhythm Industry: 1013 S. Tyndall Ave.
Suggested donation $7.