explore SOUND + MOVEMENT workshop
07/22/2016 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Explore SOUND & MOVEMENT
Improvisation is the process of spontaneous creativity that exist in all forms of art. Sound and movement are inseparable.
When it comes to an improvisation session with dancers and musicians, most of the time we separate the two, and usually musicians play for dancers to move and dancers move to the sound of the musicians. How can they coexist in an interdisciplinary way?
“How can a musician move and interact with a dancer while playing or resting, and how can a dancer ‘play’ with his/her body and move with a musician?”
In this improvisatory process, the artists are not just limited to their own art, but they use each other’s mediums/means of expression. In other words, the musician “dances” and the dancer makes music, switching freely from one artform to the other, or doing both simultaneously.
The musician may participate in the choreography with his/her own body while playing and the dancer is free to use all sound-producing surfaces, materials around and body in order to co-create music.
This workshop aims at exploring and sharing some of these aspects, bringing musicians and dancers closer to each other’s creative process through improvisation, through exchanging artforms. We will explore our musical impulses, open our senses and push artistic boundaries.
The workshop is dependent on participation and we welcome dancers and musicians regardless of background, instrument or experience.
This workshop will culminate in a performance the next day (July 22 @ 8pm). If you are interested in participating in both please indicate so in your registration.
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Part 1: “Feeling Sound”
Explore how sound may be ‘heard’ by using the entire body, not just our ears. We will attune our bodies to a variety of frequencies using exercises inspired by deaf virtuoso percussionist, Dame Evelyn Glennie. By training the body to be more receptive of where exactly frequencies are felt, we can begin to create our own unique physical sound map of the body and develop a holistic hearing that can redefine how we listen to our selves and others.
Part 2: “Dance with a musician”
Have you ever danced with a musician while s/he is playing his instrument?
We will explore how the physical movement of a musician can effect a dancer’s movement and how the movement and/or the sound of a dancer can effect a musician’s sound and movement too.
Part 3: “Graphic Scores”
Graphic Scores are music compositions with visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation which evolved in the 1950s. Dancers and musicians will create based on given graphic scores by New Yorker composers (e.x Cornelius Cardew, Chistian Wolff). We will also create our own graphic scores, developing interdisciplinary vocabulary for a structured improvisation.
Part 4: “Is it the end?”
In improvisational performances, “endings” can be moments of uncertainty, which may lead to awkwardness. How can an ‘ending’ be shaped and how can we build a unified awareness of it?
BEN BROWN is Vancouver-based drummer, composer and teacher. Recent highlights include an 8-month solo European and U.S. tour, where he collaborated with musicians and dancers and studied privately with master percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.
Ben is the founder of Music And Movement Mondays (MAMM), an improvisational series between musicians and dancers.
He regularly collaborates with dancers and choreographers and he has worked with Katie Duck, Justune A, Chambers, Deanna Peters and David McIntosh/Lee Sy-Feh of battery opera performance.
As a composer he has created scores for both dance and film including commissioned works for Areli Moran, Jamme Valin and The Western Front with U.K’s Szuper Gallery. These compositions have been featured at festivals in Vancouver, Toronto and Mexico.
He has also performed with musicians such as Francois Houle, Tony Wilson, Wilbert De Joode, Ig Henneman, K-OS and Jill Barber.
In April 2013 Ben received a Juno Award for ‘Best Instrumental Album’ of the year with the group Pugs and Crows.
https://www.facebook.com/mammimprov/
ANDRIA NICODEMOU is a multifaceted musician, improviser and teacher from Cyprus, specializing in vibraphone. She has received a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Improvisation from the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where she lives.
Andria has been always challenging herself, exploring and going beyond the conventional music boundaries, searching for new sounds and extending the vibraphone sound techniques. Her music is characterized as an ‘open-ended’ play where movement, theatricality and sound are equally important.
She has worked in diverse interdisciplinary art projects, with multi-media artists, dancers and visual artists in Europe and USA.
She has collaborated with musicians such as Anthony Coleman, Joe Morris, Ikue Morri, Gerald Cleaver, Tayler Ho Bynum, Tatsuya Nakatani, Ab Baars, Anne La Berge, Michael Vatcher, Jim Hobbs, Guilermo Gregorio, Marc Sanders, Ingrid Laubrock, Brandon Lopez, among others.
Andria is the co-founder of the Thread Ensemble, that works with educational programs and gives interactive concerts and workshops, developing expressivity and creativity through improvisation.
In July 2014 she received the honorary U.S. Visa for prominent artistic personalities.
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