Festival of Interactive Physics
Intensive Workshop and Informal Performance
Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas
Toronto, Canada
May 17-21, 2006
COEXISTING FORMS
Furthering our research into performable structured improvisation, we’ll
work with three independent but interconnected forms – contact improvisation,
live improvised music, and a movement practice called “come as you
are.” The simultaneous overlay of these three “coexisting
forms” will organize our performance at the end of the workshop.
Each form will be examined individually. We’ll refresh and refine
our practice of contact improvisation through essential skills and extended
periods of dancing. Detailed listening practice will strengthen our perception
of sound and music. We will also experiment with “come as you are,”
a movement structure that invites precise and unadorned embodiment of
changing states. Then, combining the forms, we’ll use Mike’s
“86 aspects of composition” to focus and evaluate our improvisations.
We’ll investigate coexistence on three levels—between individual
dancers, between movement forms, and between the dance and the music.
Alone, in and out of contact, in silence and with live music, we’ll
study changes of state, natural composition, presence, and relationship,
developing more conscious and varied relationships between what we hear
and see and how we move. Come prepared to dance, listen, watch, talk,
and dance some more!
BIOS:
NANCY STARK SMITH : See biography
link to the left on this website for bio.
MIKE VARGAS began playing music in 1959.
His curiosity and love of collaboration have led him through many contexts
and cultures, from cocktail lounges in Indonesia to New York’s Lower
East Side, from cancer wards to the Kennedy Center. Since 1980 he has
been composing, performing nationally and internationally, teaching music
and improvisation, creating well over 100 commissioned dance scores, and
presenting his music in concert and on CDs. He has taught at universities
across the USA and has participated regularly at numerous festivals such
as the Bates Dance Festival and Tanzsommer Innsbruck. For the last 7 years
he has been teaching and performing with Nancy Stark Smith.
Contact: Pam Johnson, pamjohn@sympatico.ca
Flyer: http:\\kaeja.org/FIP/
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