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KATIE DUCK: IMPROVISATION Workshop - June 10-11, 2017, Berlin

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KATIE DUCK: IMPROVISATION Workshop - June 10-11, 2017, Berlin

KATIE DUCK: IMPROVISATION
Workshop in Performance Research and Improvisational Compositions

DATE: June 10-11, 2017
VENUE: EDEN Studios - part of Dock11 Berlin -
COST: Earlybird 110€ (money transfer until April 30, 2017), thereafter 135€

REGISTRATION: For registration details and additional information about the workshop please contact me by e-mail at [email protected]
EVENT WEBSITE: http://contact-improvisation.net/2017/02/22/improvisation-ws-by-katie-du...
SOCIAL: https://www.facebook.com/events/1297089163710712/

SCHEDULE:
June 10-11, 2017
Saturday: 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00
Sunday: 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:
Katie Duck has been investigating theater, dance and music with live performance for over 30 years. In her workshop, she takes a microscopic view on the role improvisation plays in a live performance, combining her background in performing arts with her curiosity for advances in brain studies, music and movement research.

WHO CAN ATTEND?
Katie can accept students from all performance art backgrounds and professional levels. Her only concern is that anyone who studies in her workshop has a deep interest in the work and is willing to experiment and take risks with the material she offers.

WHAT CAN YOU LEARN?
Improvisational performance breaks the framework of preset choreography and challenges the artist to be the creator/composer/choreographer and the performer at the same time; to be the doer and the observer simultaneously. It is about learning ‘The Eye': of the space, of the watcher and essentially the eye of work being created.

The workshop is oriented towards building skills of performance presence, timing, tracking and conviction of choice/action. It focuses on developing skills to interpret dynamic space and create one’s own performance frame. While Katie aims to explore novel and rigorous approaches to body work. The main focus lies in reaching a state of surprising oneself. The workshop will be structured into body work, activity-based sessions, performances and a jam.

Her warm-up and exercises emphasize how the eyes and the ears work in coordination with movement, sound and how the exposure to gathered crowds alter our perception of time, space, feelings and emotions. Improvisation sessions revolve around the terms pause, flow, exit, choice and presence with discussions articulating play, memory and intuition.

Katie guides the dancers and performers through physical exercises that highlight how the eyes and ears affect movement choices and utilizes developmental brain studies about “how we learned to walk”. She extends the workshop toward improvisation sessions by setting a fictional front in the studio space and then declaring it as a platform to choose pause, flow or exit. This platform highlights how the limit of these three choices can already provide a frame for a composition to take place, and that misunderstanding, coincidence, live time, interactivity, messiness, emotions, intuition and inspiration are basic materials in the creative process. These raw materials are integrated in the combined fact that everyone in the workshop group can make a choice.

WORKSHOP SETTING:
Choice is introduced to the workshop group as a compositional reality but also as a means for individuals to choose to participate in the performance and yet remain involved in the process. The aim is to gather the workshop group to recognize that in a creative composition process, time is passing at different perceived speeds and that space is shifting in several dimensions at once. This awareness creates a presence in the space and a compositional alertness.

Her aim is to provide a situation where artists can practice together and grow in confidence toward public performances with an objective to clarify that improvisation is not the antitheses of choreography or composition, but rather the way choreography and composition can be executed together.

The improvisation sessions are given a delegated time frame with an option for the workshop group to shift, drop or lift the space at will. This shifting, dropping and lifting of the performance space places each individual in a position where they need to be to be fully awake or they will loose the thread of the creative compositional activity in play.

HOW DOES KATIE TEACH?
Katie has been teaching since she began to perform professionally in the mid 70’s. She is dedicated to how process and research play a major role in how one can sustain an artistic approach to their life and their work.

Over the past 10 years her workshops have been titled “Improvisation” in order to emphasize her views on theater as a live art form reflective of how she executes her own professional performances. Her research is placed in practice with lectures containing her recent interest in brain studies and film.

She integrates her current research making each workshop completely unique. She draws from her experiences in live performances, music collaborations, as a director and a choreographer.

Her enthusiasm for young artists to be able to continue their practice, in a very different atmosphere than when she began her work, is evident in how she has continued to upgrade her life style with new technologies, continued to do research in the sciences, performing arts and music. She has created several projects which aim to support young artists rather than her own career. She continues to take risks with her own career in the support of young artists giving them the possibility to experiment within their own practice.
She teaches her students that the mental connection to the practice of improvisation can be accessed weather they are doing set or open framed performance pieces and that the definitions of what improvisation within art practices means today needs to be reflective of the advances in brain-studies and technology.

In the way she communicates with students, one is aware of how she understands that the professional field of the arts has altered drastically in comparison to when she began her practice in the mid 70’s. As part of her teaching, she encourages young artists to devise strategies that allow them to sustain the production of their work with creativity and research involved and yet survive.

RESEARCH MATERIAL:
Katie has had the possibility to create material for her workshops out of a wide range of practice in the performing arts. She has never formulated her teaching material into a frozen body of knowledge. She does not believe that the accumulation of knowledge is how one becomes a teacher. She believes that it is out of her practice and the practice she witnesses with a student that all knowledge becomes clarified in her lessons.
http://katieduck.com/about-katie-duck/text/research-material/

QUOTES FROM KATIE DUCK:
“The combination of moving, seeing, hearing, feeling and deliberately volunteering to expose myself in front of an audience alters my perception of time, space and emotions. What I do for a living is an induced neuron madness”

“I am not interested in the moment even though it does feel good. I am interested in movement and the fact that time is passing. It is a kind of hippie hype to encourage someone to be in the moment.”

“A fully awake body is rarely pedestrian. The body awake needs to be discovered and demands a discipline beyond everyday tasks. And yet when I see movement that does not respect the beauty of the body as pedestrian I become uncomfortable. How the body works and how I see a body is not so different an activity in how I feel. To not respect the body as an already perfect place of motion is like watching a dog trying to learn ballet.”

VIDEOS:
Cage make a movie
(Solo Katie / Music Mix Katie Duck)
https://vimeo.com/140120365

Duck and Snaith (girls at work)
(Yolanda Snaith and Katie Duck / music mix Katie Duck)
https://vimeo.com/140186320

Recent improvisation (OT301 Amsterdam / live musicians)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqgPUVvf-S8

Katie Duck & Alfredo Genovesi at SDSU - closing talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0zeo5s1BzA

OTHER LINKS:
DR Sharon Smith essay about working with Katie Duck
http://www.sharonsmith.org/5-its-not-what-you-do-its-the-way-that-you-do...

KATIE DUCK’S BIO:
Katie Duck has been a professional performer and creator since the early 1970’s. She has been an influential figure in the international improvisational performance scene, inspiring generations of performers, musicians and performance makers. She set up the acclaimed Gruppo in Italy in 1979 and toured Europe with a host of productions. She was head of choreography at Dartington College of arts (senior lecturer) in the late 1980’s. She joined the staff of Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de kunsten in 1991 teaching movement research, improvisation, composition and technique and founded the improvisational dance and music company Magpie in the 1990’s with whom she toured internationally. She has collaborated with renowned dance and improvisation music artists from all over the world. Katie’s career has included independent teaching, university teaching, set choreography, structured improvisations, music and dance performances and live streaming international performances. She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, lighting designers, dancers, actors and comedians. She has initiated education courses and workshops, festivals and monthly performance series in Italy, England and Holland. She has led dance and music companies, advised young artists and written texts for her performances as well as critical articles. Katie has a determination to continue her research in theatre, music, dance, text and performance. Alongside her vocational studies, her research has led her toward social studies, cultural studies and brain studies. She believes that her research must not be validated by way of academic language alone, but rather on her insistence to hear, see and take part in the practice.
More at Katie’s website: http://katieduck.com/about-katie-duck/bio/

LOCATION:
EDEN***** STUDIOS
Breite Strasse 43
13187 Berlin (Pankow)
http://www.dock11-berlin.de/index.php/cat/c4_Service.html
…scroll down to "STUDIO 190.EG,“ in Haus 2

TRAFFIC LINKS:
Tram-Station „Pankow-Kirche“: M1, M50
U & S-Bahn Pankow: U2, M27, S2, S8, RE3, RE5
Bus: 107, 155, 250, 255, X54, N50, N2
https://www.google.de/maps?daddr=13187+Berlin,+Breite+Strasse+43

PHOTO CREDIT:
Irene Fabri

 

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