Circularity in Contact Improvisation workshop, with Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot.

We are excited to welcome the wonderful and experienced contact dancer Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot to Glasgow. There are limited places so book early to avoid disappointment!

In this one-day workshop we’ll kiss and befriend the floor, fall into and rise from it, and will use curves rather than straight lines to find ease and efficiency. We will put the focus on studying ways to be more spherical in our dance to be able to make more choices when improvising.

To round your motion is helpful to prevent injury, get more efficient and be able to make your dance readable for a CI partner. But beyond the safety and possibly aesthetic aspect, to look for curves allows you to engage with infinite pathways of motion and of thoughts that expand further starting and arrival points.

We will start with technical aspects of rounding our body to the floor, to another body/partner, and in space, looking for multi-directionality and for the body tone that will allow this quality to arise. We will then move into circular pathways and how we navigate between moving and thinking, between sensations and directions. These elements will help us articulate and refine our own movement palette to use in some scores, observing and playing with how information circulates amongst a group for physical, playful and poetic composition. Bodily feedback, pleasure and serious playfulness will be key in directing our choices.

Anne-Gaëlle is a French dance artist based in London for the past 9 years. Her background in dance, geology and movement education has led her to engage in a path combining artistic and pedagogic practice with the environment, be it the studio, other beings, theatres, urban or natural landscapes. Her approach combines somatic and intuitive bodily intelligence with intention through frameworks coming from choreology (Laban-based theory and practice), philosophical meandering, post-modern theories, social activity and in-depth physical research. First self-trained, then trained at Laban and through a good number of Contact Improvisation and Instant Composition workshops and retreats, she has worked with many choreographers and artists, among which h2dance, Lisa-May Thomas, Tara D’Arquian, Annie Lok, Noa Zamir, Joe Moran, , and has had long-term collaborations with companies Dance United, Candoco and The City Literary. Over the past four years, she has helped developing alternative schemes for independent artists to keep an on-going research and practice of making, and has run the Contact Improvisation Society at Goldsmiths College. Among the people who continually inspire her are Julyen Hamilton, Kirstie Simson, Nancy Stark-Smith and Mike Vargas, Angus Balbernie, Antony Gormley, Simone Forti, Sasha Waltz and Juhani
Pallasmaa.