Making Dance Maps: mining the source

Both dance works—Zhōng Xīn and In Search of the Holy Chop Suey—began with a simple question: what if we were all given the same map?

This led to a deeper curiosity:

What makes us who we are? Can I see with new eyes? How do I know when I become me? Am I still who I am even without my familiar…?
~ Making Dance Maps instructor,  yvonne ng

About Making Dance Maps

These four, two-hour workshops will follow the same process, starting with these questions, we will focus on:  

Day 1 / Touch
Monday, January 22, 2018 – 7-9pm
Tap into your perception through your skin and bring awareness to this sensory faculty and use it to generate original movement vocabulary.

Day 2 / Colour
Tuesday, January 23, 2018 – 7-9pm
Explore colour through movement and writing.  Colours are everywhere in our lives, affecting our emotions and thoughts, causing actions and reactions. Use specific exercises to connect colour directly and indirectly to choreography.

Day 3 / Poem Score
Wednesday, January 24, 2018 – 7-9pm
Model three Poem Scores Yvonne Ng wrote for Zhōng Xīn, inspired by Deborah Hay and Stephanie Skura, to create your own solo.

Day 4 / Text & Movement
Thursday, January 25, 2018 – 7-9pm
Create your own text and use as a tool to produce new movement vocabulary.

Over four days, we will explore creative avenues and new entry points into finding the ‘dance’ in the memories and stories inside us. Yvonne offers this method of Open Source Forms® (OSF) as well as the work of Simone Forti, Yukio Waguri & Yumiko Yoshioka (Butoh) and Lisa Neilson and her own artistic research to lead participants in movement explorations, guided by the philosophy that we are all natural movers with a vast capacity for expression.

Participants will be guided in an improvisational setting and using imagery as a powerful tool for transformation, and weaving together various ways to warm the body and the imagination into a ready state of physicality.  This will allow the participants to uncover and originate movement focusing and building on their impulses and personal histories found in their physical self.  Using the choreographic vocabulary that each participant has generated, Yvonne will guide the participants with strategies to development of their choreographic voice, and with a practised eye will gently mitigate the natural tendencies to fall back on learned or derivative choreography.

This work celebrates diversity, collaboration, and individual creative empowerment: free of inhibition, accessing intuitive knowing, and inviting the mind to collaborate.

A remarkably effective and revolutionary way of learning, the OSF approach can catalyze learning and transformation in many kinds of practices, in movement as well as voice, acting, and other fields of learning and creation.

Background on OSF:

Fluidly expanded from Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), Open Source Forms is about cross-fertilizations and deep commonalities of SRT and creative process: shedding outer layers, finding primal energy, agility navigating subconscious realms, and imagery as powerful tool for transformation.

Workshop Details

• COST $35 full (8 hours) or $10 per workshop (2 hours)
• LOCATION The Registry Theatre
• SCHEDULE Daily workshops designed to be attended separately, in any combination or all together.
• GEAR Wear warm, comfortable, loose clothing, be prepared to work in bare feet or socks. Participants are encouraged to bring paper and pen to write and draw with, water to drink, snacks.
• EXPERIENCE LEVEL For pre-professional and professional artists.
• CLASS SIZE Limited – Please register in advance

Register Now

To register, or for more info:
call 519-585-7763 or email pam@mtspace.ca

tiger princess dance projects:
In Search of the Holy Chop Suey and Zhōng Xīn

As a culmination of the workshop, see Yvonne Ng and tiger princess dance projects in In Search of the Holy Chop Suey and Zhōng Xīn in a special performance at The Registry Theatre on Saturday, January 27 at 7:30pm.

More information here

Acknowledgement

Making Dance Maps: mining the source with dancer Yvonne Ng is presented as a partnership between MT Space and The Registry Theatre and the Dance @ The Registry Series which is supported by Heffner Toyota, Heffner Lexus, and the Ontario Arts Council.