upcoming:

HZT Wintersemester 2021

Course title: Music and Movement in Practice and Theory

Class archive:

THIS TECHNIQUE*

Summer Semester 2021

15 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

*Collaboration with performance and sound artist Assaf Fleischmann

Working with movement and music lessons, This Technique asks how technique can support students as they meet challenges with various musical rhythms and coordinated movements. Can we refine the tools for our improvising with classical technique? Starting from a period of reflecting on what type of movement and music style inspire each student, this course is about how to work with technique in service of that particular ambition and will specifically consider the histories of jazz and ballet "standards".

BALLET IN TIMES OF CHANGE OR WHY THE PLEASANT FACE?*

Winter Semester 2020

15 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

*Collaboration with performance and sound artist Zen Jefferson

Using ballet vocabulary, classes instruct functional movement and timing: how to place your skeletons for efficient dynamics in turning, changing weight, and jumping. Classes are taught with Cecchetti (an Italian method) ballet principles. Ideas are presented and deconstructed by the teacher and all parts are practiced by the students. Another dimension is sound and meter. Through collaboration with sound artist and performer Zen Jefferson, we will question ballet in terms of feminist pedagogy, sonic repetitions, authorship, and mood. We will exchange ideas about sound and experience, and host conversations about dance history, technique and ethics. While we cannot ignore that ballet is a routine social practice, we can make the space to consider our bodies inside routinized social dynamics. Time will be built into the course for critical reflection on how white supremacy impacts us in this form.

YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: MY MOVEMENT PRACTICE*

Winter Semester 2020

15 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

*Collaboration with educator Regina Baumgart

This course addresses students who are interested in developing their own movement practice–as a daily practice and training or in reference to a specific choreographic project and movement creation. Andrew and Regina will support and accompany your research by offering input and exchange on important aspects concerning movement practice and movement development and will assist you in your process, asking you to facilitate “input sessions” for others in the course to experience your ideas in practice.

TRY IT AGAIN*

Summer Semester 2020

15 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

*Collaboration with artist em*sama kann

Utilizing our sense-based knowledge and continuous practice of dance, throughout the semester students are asked to develop personal (if provisional) assertions about the concept of technique. Methodologically, we will examine theories of technique as they have evolved in sociological and philosophical discourse in a Western context from Aristotle to Max Weber, Michel Foucault to bell hooks and Naomi Klein; highlighting the rise of neoliberalism and the ethics of self-determination and self-actualizing. We will read and discuss texts, watch videos, engage with guest artists, write, reflect, and move. This interdisciplinary course positions the following theoretical questions in relation to our dance practices: What is technique? Under what conditions can movement be perceived as technical? What is the relationship between technique and personal expression?

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

Summer Semester 2019, Workshop

2 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

Borrowing its title from the novel by Joan Didion, this workshop gives students choreographic tools embedded in performative practices of reading space and writing mouths. We investigate the strange desires and poetic perceptions affected inside us in the process of learning to dance. Methodologically, we will consider various ways of seeing and projecting ephemeral information. We analyze editing techniques for film and text (choreography from a video performance by Amii Stewart; live reading of ‘All About Love’ by bell hooks), and learn scores by Lisa Nelson, expanding them by altering the directions, discussing the effects, and performing new iterations for each other under conditions of our devising.

BALLET*

Summer Semester 2018, Winter Semester 2018, Winter Semester 2019

15 week course

Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

*Accompanied by artist David Bloom

Working with principles from Janet Panetta’s work ‘Ballet for Contemporary Dancers’ and ‘Deconstructing Ballet’, students engage with a daily practice of ballet technique lessons with live piano accompaniment. The class focuses on placement of skeleton and weight and builds in dynamics from soft somatic oriented experiences, to big bounding movements across the floor.