This improvisation class will explore radical inclusion and allowing-in through movement and perception. Tuning through the body, working with playful curiosity, we will cultivate ‘noticing’, welcome an unruly variety of movement styles, and open up to unexpected and surprising connections within and between bodies. We will welcome both our most virtuosic, and our most ridiculous, movement, and allow ourselves to be touched, and moved by, sound and music.
We will approach these investigations individually and in encounters with each other, welcoming in new perceptions, meetings, and surprises as we go; experimenting through the body as a way to feel more at home in ourselves and with each other.
This class will use a variety of tasks drawn from Julia Pond’s own improvisation and facilitation practice, which in turn has been influenced by somatic movement, interdisciplinary performance, contemplative practice, politics, and early 20th century dance. The inspiration for the class springs from a partnership with Draper Together, a charity which organises art and community events at Draper Estate (a neighbour of Independent Dance) and where Julia’s installation BRED will be presented in June 2022. Some spaces in this class will be reserved for members of that community.
This class was previously going to be led by Flora Wellesley Wesley who is unfortunately no longer able to teach.
Julia Pond is an interdisciplinary, independent dance artist. Her diverse experience includes helping to found an experimental contemplative artistic community (Art Monastery Project), obtaining an MA in International Relations, 3 full-length dance/theatre works made in collaboration with musicians, immersion in Duncan technique and repertory, and 8 years of ‘accidental practice-as-research’ in the corporate world. This last helped inform Julia’s current work, a durational installation of a company called BRED which is ‘rethinking value and productivity’ Julia is a co-initiator of the podcast DanceOutsideDance, featuring interdisciplinary conversations.
As a performer Julia has worked with visual and dance artists, including Serena Korda, Julie-Rose Bower, Zorka Wollny, Lori Belilove’s Isadora Duncan Dance Company (2001-2005). Teaching credits include Lincoln University, Intercultural Roots, People’s Friendship University Moscow, and others throughout the UK and Europe. She co-organised the Isadora Duncan International Symposium (2014-2018) and has presented at Trinity Laban’s Parallax 15 Symposium and Art.Earth’s Borrowed Time Symposium.