Contact Improvisation Workshop with Steve Batts – A compositional approach

Sunday 8th September 2019 12pm – 4pm

Tickets: €15

Booking (021) 4507487 (Opening hours 1pm – 4pm Tuesday to Friday)

Or book online

Programmed by Junk Ensemble, Cork City Dance Artists in Residence at Firkin Crane

This workshop is open to anyone who is interested and designed for all levels of experience. My approach is to give clear practical and conceptual proposals as a basis for shared exploration, improvisation and composition.

I will guide participants into improvising alone and into physical contact to discover some of the endless possibilities offered when we commit to improvising with a partner. We will roll and crawl, fall and climb, lift and slide, walk and stand, according to each person’s interest and desire and ability. The only requirement is to have the desire to explore your poetic potential in movement, alone and in close physical contact with other people.

For me Contact Improvisation is quite a simple proposal. Dancing in close proximity, including in physical contact, with other people is wonderfully enriching. This is “Contact”. Dancing with no fixed plan is a magical challenge. This is “Improvisation”. In this workshop we will embrace the idea: “maybe this is watched”.

Steve Batts has been dancing and teaching Contact Improvisation for over thirty years. He is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, performer and teacher of the Alexander Technique. He is Artistic Director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company from Derry-Londonderry in Northern Ireland. He teaches internationally. Some of the places he has been teaching recently are Ireland, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Italy, Sweden, Romania and England. He teaches all sorts of people… professional dancers, actors, children with and without their parents, older people, and people with disabilities. His main interest in teaching is to have the opportunity to discover the natural poetic-movement worlds of other people, whether they consider themselves to be dancers or not, and to enjoy these worlds as enrichments of his own artistic practice.

Echo Echo Festival Bursary

After the workshop there will be a short information session where workshop participants can learn about the bursary programme for support to attend the seventh Echo Echo Festival of Dance and Movement, 5th – 16th November 2019.

Bursaries are open to participants of this workshop and of workshops in Dublin 5th September/Galway 6th September/Tralee 7th September/Belfast 8th September/Carrick-on-Shannon 14th September. See www.echoechodance.com/projects/festival-workshop-tour-2019 for further details.