Hotbed #1

Tere O’Connor

MAKING DANCES

Tere O’Connor has spent years developing methods to facilitate choreographic explorations for artists. Born as a consequence of his own auto-didactic journey into choreography, this workshop has subsequently become integral to his work. It is a dialogue with the process of art-making. He attempts to create an awareness of prejudices and affinities and look at the interrelatedness of these in each artist’s work. He promotes development of the objectivity required to locate clear intentions detached from the accidents of representation. Rejecting a “good/bad” paradigm, his desire is for artists to create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought and to rigorously pursue the “science” of their poetics. Through the daily creation of little dance works and group discussions, the artist focuses his/her attention on how the action they are engaged in contains meaning, how to grow this in choreographic terms and to how to edit from internal and external sources.
The workshop welcomes choreographers, performers, designers etc, doing the same work from different points of view, but looking for ways to corral into usage the questions that arise through process.

Talk with Tere O’Connor

Lucy Guerin Inc would like to invite you to come to a talk with US choreographer Tere O'Connor. Tere will be discussing his recent works and sharing his extensive knowledge and original approach to dance and dance-making.

Tere is one of the most influential choreographers of his generation in New
York City. He is the director of Tere O'Connor Dance and has toured his works extensively throughout world. He has been commissioned by numerous dance companies including Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, de Rotterdamse Dansgroep, Holland; Carte Blanche, Norway; TRAFO/The Workshop Foundation, Hungary; for Canadian dancers Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux in Montreal; Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh, PA; and Zenon in Minneapolis, MN. In addition to Greta in a Ditch for White Oak, he recently created a solo work for Mikhail Baryshnikov entitled Indoor Man.

Tere is a 1993 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award, a National Dance Project Award and a DNA Project Award from Arts International. He has also won two 'Bessie' awards. http://www.tereoconnordance.org

When: 6:30pm, Friday 22nd August 2008

Where: Meat Market – Arts House, 5 Blackwood Street North Melbourne

Hotbed #2

Ros Warby, Lucy Guerin, Rebecca Hilton
February/March 2009
Three workshops presented by Lucy Guerin Inc – free of charge
Applications open – Deadline: 5pm Monday 15th December 2008

Ros Warby, Rebecca Hilton and Lucy Guerin will each give workshops of one week to share their process and current creative approaches to movement, with dancers in the local community. These dance artists have worked together as well as with other Australian and international choreographers and have built unique reputations on their choreographic and dancing expertise, and their possession of a rich store of information about physical movement and structures.

Warby, Hilton and Guerin have all danced with Russell Dumas, Danceworks and Lucy Guerin Inc. They have also had different experiences with a range of choreographers and have arrived at individual places in their careers. It is hoped that many participants in these workshops can attend all three and therefore gain and understanding of how these artist have developed different yet connected practices from similar backgrounds.

Workshop Descriptions

Ros Warby
2 – 6 February 2009 12.30pm to 4:30pm
Warby’s teaching focuses on the development of the dancer’s performance practice. She encourages the students to eliminate attachment to prescribed techniques or choreographic approaches and invites the body to undo any pre-conceived notions of what dance is, thereby creating a chance for the dancer to express a complex and indefinable range of experience through the humour, intelligence and emotional engagement of the dancing body. Creating a solo adaptation from one of her choreographies she would use this form to introduce the dancers to these ideas.

Rebecca Hilton
2 – 6 March 2009 1pm to 5pm
Extraordinary ordinary
Hilton’s present interest is in making art that reflects contemporary community/society/humanity. She is looking to develop a movement vocabulary that directly reflects that idea rather than abstracting it, but without being mimetic or imitative. In the context of this workshop, participants will research physical habit
and nuance in a variety of ways. They will secretly stalk people in public spaces, gather images from visual art and media and microscopically examine their friends and family in private to assemble material that is both phenomenally complex and infinitely possible. They will work on layering and juxtaposing streams of postural/gestural information and on developing a vocabulary that is both accessible and virtuosic, familiar and strange.

Lucy Guerin
23 – 27 March 2009 1pm to 5pm
In her workshops, Guerin continues with current concepts that she is exploring in her dance making, inviting the participants to take part in her creative process. This workshop will focus on the connection between language and dance which Guerin has begun to examine in recent works. It will generate a vocabulary that utilises, but is not aesthetically defined by each person’s technical training and will delve into the body’s infinite capacity for spontaneous originality.

Discussion

Friday 27 March 2009 6pm – 7.30pm
These workshops will culminate in a discussion between Hilton, Guerin and Warby led by a moderator. This discussion will explore both the individual concerns and pathways of each artist and their perspectives on current dance practice. It is intended that it will be attended by all workshop participants but will also be open to other members of the dance community.

Hotbed Workshop # 3

Mette Ingvartsen (Denmark)

Dates: 29 March - 1 April
Time: 10am - 3pm
Lucy Guerin Inc Studio
14 Batman street
West Melbourne

Application deadline: 6pm Wednesday March 17th
Workshop is free of charge

Work-shop on practice

What are the limits of what we call a practice and how do we work on developing it?
In this work-shop we will explore how practices within the performing arts can be defined today. Are we practicing when we are reading, writing, thinking, imagining or rather when we are moving, testing and trying?

Between physical, verbal, mental and immaterial practices we will be dancing, discussing, talking and moving. Sharing ideas on how to make performances and how to develop methodologies that correspond to specific areas of interest.

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. From 1999 she studied in Amsterdam and
Brussels where she in summer 2004 graduated from the performing arts school P.A.R.T.S. Since summer 2002 she has instigated several research projects and made numerous performances, among others “Manual Focus”(2003), “50/50”(2004), “to come”(2005) and “Why We Love Action”(2006).

Her more recent work evolves around questions of perception and sensation including “It’s in The Air” (2008) a collaboration with Jefta Van dinther and with her latest two pieces “GIANT CITY” and “Evaporated Landscapes” (2009).

Besides her performance work she is engaged in research and her practice involves writing, making, performing and documenting work. She teaches and gives work-shops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices. Since 2005 she has been working on “everybodys”, an open ongoing collaborative project based on open source strategies, aiming at producing tools and games that can be used by artists to develop work.

In 2008 she participated in 6Months1Location initiated by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejic, confronting questions around education, structures of production and artistic exchange. During the 6 months she worked on the YouTube project “Where is my Privacy”, infiltrating and utilizing contemporary communication tools as a way to rethink choreographic production. As an extendsion of 6M1L she took part in organizing the festival Inpresentable09 in Madrid, usually curated by Juan Dominguez and she edited a book documenting the project’s activities.

She is part of the collective COCO’s who presented “Breeding, Brains and Beauty” in 2008 and has collaborated with Jan Ritsema and Bojana Cvejic on several theater performances.
www.aisikl.net
In 2010 she is working on several smaller site-specific events, dealing with notions of artificial nature.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Council Committee for Performing Arts.

Hotbed workshop #4

Tere O’Connor (USA) with Lucy Guerin (Australia)

Dates: July 26 – August 6, 2010
10am - 5pm

Lucy Guerin Inc
14 Batman St
West Melbourne

Following a highly successful workshop in 2008, Lucy Guerin Inc is inviting Tere O’Connor to be involved in another Hot Bed workshop in 2010. This time, he will collaborate with Lucy Guerin in creating a work in progress on ten to twelve local dancers interested in choreography. Dancers will be selected for this workshop through an application process and it will be free of charge. This workshop will give participants an insight into the methods employed by these two experienced choreographers in creating a work. Guerin and O’Connor have a shared history of ideas which over the last twenty years has stimulated an important dialogue in the creative lives of both artists. The making of this work will be a transparent process where ideas and questions about dance will be continually raised and discussed. The workshop will culminate in a showing for an invited audience. The project may form the basis of a further collaboration between Guerin and O’Connor.

Tere has been making dances since 1982 and has created over 30 works for his company. The company has performed throughout the US and in Europe, South America and Canada. O’Connor has created numerous commissioned works for dance companies around the world, among these have been works for the Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, de Rotterdamse Dansgroep, Holland; Carte Blanche, Norway; TRAFO/The Workshop Foundation, Hungary; for Canadian dancers Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux in Montreal; Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh, PA; and Zenon in Minneapolis, MN. In addition to Greta in a Ditch for White Oak, he recently created a solo work for Mikhail Baryshnikov entitled Indoor man. Tere O'Connor is a 1993 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He is also a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award and a DNA Project Award from Arts International.

He has received three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards - One for Heaven Up North in 1988, another in 1999 for Sustained Achievement, and most recently for his work Frozen Mommy (2005). He is also a recipient of repeated grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation/MAP Fund, NEFA/National Dance Project, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Arts International: The Fund for US Artists at International Festivals.
www.tereoconnordance.org