Kathy Crick and Heni Hale will lead a week of classes informed by experiential anatomy and sensory/perceptual qualities. Oscillating between specific tasks and improvisational openness we will bring attention to sensations of touch, seeing, and hearing to nurture emergent movement patterns and pathways. We will shift our enquiry between our interior movement landscape and our relationship to others and our environment.
Through questioning and observing the effects of imagination on our physical states and applying compositional structures, such as repetition or giving special time frames for certain activities, we invite change in our perception of ourselves and the worlds that we are. The classes will also involve working with dialogue and writing to give feedback into the bodywork and offer different choices of response.
For safety, we would like to encourage everyone to take a Covid-19 lateral flow test before attending. The studio will also be well-ventilated even in colder weather – please bring extra layers for warmth. Siobhan Davies Studios current risk assessment and policy is available to read here.
Kathy Crick teaches Improvisation, Contact Improvisation, Choreography and Performance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London. She is interested in improvisation as an integrated technical, compositional and performance practice, considering the layers of play between structure and spontaneity. Whilst studying Theatre, she encountered Release Dance with Mary Fulkerson and Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton and Mary Prestidge – experiences that have continued to inform her practice. Over a period of thirty-five years, she has worked as a performer, collaborator and teacher with artists from the fields of dance, theatre, music and moving image. Kathy has contributed to many Dance and Performing Arts programmes in Higher Education in the UK and in independent community settings. Other influences include studies in education, psychology, shiatsu, anatomy and an MA in Dance and Somatic Well Being (University of Central Lancashire).
Henrietta Hale is currently co-director of Independent Dance, whilst maintaining a freelance artistic practice and continuing as founding co-director of Dog Kennel Hill Project, a collective company of performance makers with Rachel Lopez de la Nieta and Ben Ash.
She has been producing performances since 1999 in a variety of contexts, collaborating with dancers, musicians, film-makers and visual artists, receiving commissions from a range of partners such as, Brighton CCA, Dance4, Dance Umbrella, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Richmond Arts Services, Imagine Watford Festival, and Stour Valley Arts.
Her work is primarily informed by somatic practices, that bring attention to breathwork, bodily co-ordination, touch, seeing and sound vibration, as ways of knowing and changing. She is interested in how these embodied knowledges translate between improvised movement, reading, speaking and writing as different but interrelated forms of collaborative, participatory sense-making.
She is lead tutor for the MA/MFA Creative practice: Dance Professional programme in partnership with Trinity Laban, curating two modules and supervising/tutoring students’ work. She performed as an independent dancer during the nineties and noughties with a range of companies. These included Rosemary Lee Dances, Ricochet Dance Productions, Yolande Snaith Theatredance, Russell Maliphant, and National Dance Company of Wales.