July 12-16
Retreat and Training Week
is a relaxed and open week for newcomers and old friends to reunite at the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival. This week is made for beginners and advanced practicioners alike. We call it the retreat and training week because we want to encourage people to do just as much swimming, relaxing and hanging out as they train, talk, teach or process about their work. Each day six classes are offered. You may drop into these classes on the day you arrive or pre-register. It is only important to pre-register when you would like to secure private accomodations, and when you come with children. Otherwise you are welcome to get on the train and just show up!!!
classes run from 9:45-11:15, 11:30-13:30, 18:30-20:00
check ruf bus schedule in DETAIL!
We offer feldenkrais, release based techniques, shiatsu, contact improvisation, body work into dancing, iyengar & ashtanga-yoga, bmc, tai chi, upside down work & alignment and other unique mixes of improvisational work and practice.
The evenings are mixed with jams, sauna, talks, video showings, bar, fireside chats, spontaneous discos and informal showings.
be prepared to want to stay longer.....
some class descriptions:
Jan Burkhardt: Representation on stage
what do we represent when we are on stage- physical and psychological space and time, narrative, emotions, thoughts... and much more.
how can we radiate different times and spaces and let audience follow us on our trip- or project their own trip on us ?
when do we lead, when do we follow, use or lose control of the situation we are in and we are telling with our bodies.
how can we be in what we do and at the same time look at ourselves from outside without losing intensity?
Meagan O'Shea: Playing Games to Train the Creative Body
Drawing on improvisation practices in contemporary dance, clown, jeux, and storytelling, this class moves us out of our heads and into our bodies.
Paige Starling Sorvillo: Tastes like Sugar.
An associative sense-sourcing practice to cultivate your synesthetic awareness in improvisation and composition. Hear red. Smell the temperature of dawn. Hold in your hand the sound of time passing.
Ulrike Bodammer: Vinyasa Yoga
Power vinyasa flow yoga is a modern flowing yoga style which synchronizes breath and movement.
The yoga asanas (positions) are precisely constructed and presented so that they can be understood from their origin and reason.
This yoga class is challenging, expressive, and at the same time liberating, stimulating and meditative.
Challenge yourself and find new impulses for your daily life.
Connect more deeply with your pure and honest self through observing and realizing your inner needs and wishes.
Kay Grothusen: Tai Chi: It Just Takes Forever
This course will focus on the first part of the Tai Chiform according
to Professor Cheng Man-Ching. We willwork on the basic principles in solo as well
as induet form (push hands).
Patrick Slepica: Fix(ing) Contact
How can we stage Contact Improvisation? How can we isolate it from improvisation and make it a choreografic tool...
We will work from an interior space to an outer perspective.
Our goal is to find the essence of the improvisation and making concrete decisions of what needs to be there, what wants to be seen and what we can leave behind.
Malgven Gerbes & Johanna Chemnitz:
We will start by awakening our body structures and mechanisms as well as our creative mind while connecting to our breath and movement through release and principles of ashtanga yoga.
In a dynamic and connected state of body and mind, we will dive into our creative potentials, incorporating and challenging our borders.
Dealing with scores as tools for real time creation will help us to connect to our instincts, reflexes, and desires while gaining accuracy and poetry in our movements.
We will develop contrasted vocabulary by using spirals, floor work, jumps, extensions, falling, sliding, upside-down, modulation of our sense of gravity, folding and unfolding etc.
We will then dance some sequences of set movements, applying the previous kinesthetic principles, for the pleasure and challenge of dealing with choreographed material.
We will end the class with partner work, dancing in trios and bigger groups, enjoying to fly and using the potential of supportive and more risky ways of dancing together.
Karin Wickenhäuser & Jürgen Albert: The tango night bar
is an invitation for contemporary dancers to dance tango. the focus of the first part will be the connection between the partners, the leading and following. then we explore common principles of contact and tango. using the experience in contact improvisation we will work on volcadas(=leaning) and colgadas(=hanging apart) as well as on a nice lift.
the class will open the night bar - time and space to dance, practicing playfully with music.
Mamen Agüera Pérez: Juxtaposition or the space in between
the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side; also: the state of being so placed. The performer, the mover and the landscape, the surround, the environment. The two of them side by side. Creating a link, a connection.
How to develop these links, how to make these translations. How to be in the space and being the space. The space in between you and your body, you and the audience. Your movement in between the unanimated things….
Renata Piotrowska: Pelvis as a playground
“Pelvis” in terms of anatomy, “Center” in terms of contact improvisation. Pelvis-Center, as the source of balance, impulses and energy in dance. In the class we will explore our own and our partner’s pelvis in an accessible and playful way. Beginning with bodywork, then finding connections and disconnections through our centers, and arriving at giving weight and lifting.The Playground has many things to offer. Just come, and check it out!
Diana Bonillo: Exploring movement/dance by viewing the technique of weight usage. By getting into the sense of the volume of the body, and the weight of the movement, we will be brought to a concrete physicality, and a concrete way of understanding space, time, and the other bodies...."
Beata Kana: improvisation on/with the border
let's go to the border/-s and see how they inspire our improvisational work – a very site specific exploration with body space image.
Bios:
Frank James Willens is a dancer and choreographer from California who’s called Berlin home for the past five years. He dances with Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods as well as working with Laurent Chétouane and Tino Sehgal. He was nominated for dancer of the year in Ballet Tanz International in 2007, and he recently won the “Bester Darsteller Preis” (Best Performer Prize) at the Favoriten Festival in Dortmund.
Meagan O'Shea is a Canadian contemporary dance artist and director of her company, Stand Up Dance. O'Shea's work fuses dance, mulit-media, clown, and storytelling in solo and group forms. An ongoing Stand Up Dance initiative, 'dance like no one is watching' is a large scale, movable, site-specific improvised dance project. She is founding director of Hub 14 Art & Performance Works in Toronto, Canada.
Paige Starling Sorvillo is founder/director for the sf-based intermedia performance company blindsight. her work brings together image/sense-based choreographies, visual design/video, and experimental sound. she is pleased to count among her collaborators composers Evelyn Ficarra (us/uk), George Cremaschi (us/cz) and Liz Allbee (berlin) as well as US video artists Lucy HG, Eric Koziol and Ian Winters. www.blindsightperformance.org
Karin Wickenhäuser is a dancer and choreographer living in Berlin. She is teaching dance in schools within the programm "TanzZeit".
Patrick Slepica comes from circus arts and yoga to contemporary dance
learned in the tradition of german Ausdruckstanz (Lola Rogge Schule Hamburg) his main focus lies on improvisation, perception, contact
he works independently in the field of performance and installation
Johanna Chemnitz was born in1981 in Hannover, Germany.
She studied Modern and Contemporary Dance at the
Danceacademy Arnhem in the Netherlands and
then moved to Berlin in 2004. She worked as a dancer/performer
for Sasha Waltz & Guests, Eszter Gàl, Trisha Brown and many
others and studies Ashtanga Yoga at the AshtangaStudio Berlin,
where she also teaches. She is involved in the Ponderosa-Festival since 2005.
Mamen Agüera Perez
Degree in Drama,R.E.S.A.D Madrid,Spain
Basis Projekt, 2004. Bewegungs- Art Freiburg. Germany
Director & choreographer of the dance company “The little queens & CIA”
Working 7 years with different street theatre companies in Spain. I discovered the improvisation in movement thanks to the MacPia collective, and Katie Duck. After this first meeting more teachers were helping me to take the proper tools to develop my own way of improvisation: KT Niehoff, Michael Schumacher, Andrew Harwood, Lilo Stahl…But just when I met Simone Forti I did the link with skills on theatre and the improvisation in movement with words. I was performing with her in Strasbourg in 2004 and Orvieto 2006. With Shahar Dor I started to be myself performing also Augenblick 1 & 2. And I met Barnaby Tree and we organized the I international impro meeting in Granada 2006 and we perform “There was a man…” In the performance “Bänche 2007” invited by Somebodyelse Company we start to prepare a street - duet. One year ago I created my own company The Little Queens & Cía. Working meanly dance improvisation in public spaces.
Renata Piotrowska
By education she’s an actress, by practice – dance and performance maker. She was working with Nigel Charnock, Andrew L. Harwood, Michael Schumacher, and others. She got scholarships and participated in several festivals (f.e. Polish Dance Platform). She leads regular classes and workshop of contact improvisation and improvisation in Poland and abroad. She is a president of Towarzystwo Prze-Twórcze.
www.prze-tworcze.pl
www.piotrofska.art.pl
Diana Bonillo: Since 1995 Diana dedicate part of her life to dance studing in madrid ballet, flamenco and spanish classic dance. Since 2000 she gave her focus to contemporary techniques, contact improvisation and improvisation technique, traveling to Germany and israel to grow in the knowledge of movement and performance. Since 1999 she dances in diferent companies in Spain, like Danzala, Rayo Malayo, Sinffin and others.
She is currently working in Madrid with Trans Garten company and Omos Uno colective.
Beata Kana: was born in Poland, studied moving arts in Poland and Germany, performed in dancetheaterprojects: "Kommandante Che Guevara" Videodancefilm , white spaces dance with the Text "white spaces" P.Auster and Musik M. Ronnefeld; gebrochene boegen, dancing the music from G. Crumb; Kaguya Hime the story from Japan with contemporary music. The performances were showed in Germany. Netherland, Switzerland, Poland, Berlin.
After coming to Stolzenhagen improvisation, contact improvisation, action theater and teachers like Andrew Morrish, Sten Rudstroem, Rosalind Crisp and other lovely friends from Ponderosa influence her performing-life way.