Teachers and Classes
This year, we're thrilled to announce that the headliner of our 7th festival will be the legendary Daniel Lepkoff, one of the pioneers of Contact Improvisation! To honor this special opportunity, we've extended the festival to a full 8 days of immersive CI dancing and exploration.
You will find all teachers who will share their experience during the festival on this page.
Daniel Lepkoff
PHYSICAL DIALOGUES:
EXPERIMENTS IN COMMUNICATION THROUGH MOVEMENT
a dance technique and approach to movement researchdeveloped by: Daniel Lepkoff
Our living physical interactions with the environment are expressions of our desires, imagination, and intelligence. We frame this spontaneous material as "danced composition".
Addressing all our physical senses, we explore of the details inside of functional movement: breathing, rolling, reaching, crawling, standing, walking, running.....
Practicing:
-OBSERVATION
-THE MOVEMENT OF ATTENTION
-RECEIVING INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE ENVIRONMENT.
lead us, as dancers, to experience being a transmitter of questions rather than the maker of images.
Biography
DANIEL LEPKOFF is a dancer known for bringing the process of living movement into the studio and onto the stage.
Since the early '70's he played a central role in the development of Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson and Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. Throughout the '70's and '80's he traveled extensively; teaching, performing and exposing these new ideas worldwide.
He was one of the founders of Movement Research in NYC (1975), playing as active role in defining the initial conception of this seminal organization: designing new programs, curating events, teaching regular classes and offering intensive workshops.
Living in New York City in the '80's Daniel performed in the works of several choreographers including: Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Mary Fulkerson, Lisa Nelson, Mary Overlie, Judy Padow, Steve Paxton, & Nancy Topf. In this period his own movement based solo and group work experimented with the elements of voice, text, film, video, & photography, and interactions with physical objects. His work has been shown at Danspace, PS122, Movement Researh at Jusdon Church, in New York City as well as internationally throughout Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, and South America.
Over the years Daniel has engaged in several long term and important collaborations with other performing artists including: Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton; Paul Langland, Saira Blanche Theater in Moscow (Oleg Soulimenko and Andrej Andrianov), Hungarian experimental musician Dora Attila and Japanese dancer, Sakura Shimada, among others.
In 2002, working with Mira Kovarva and The Bratislava in Movement Festival Daniel was the artistic director of ' Rozhovory tiel / Physical Dialogues' a seminal artistic/educational event that brought a cross section of mature and developed approaches to improvisation.
He has published numerous articles articulating concepts that are central to his approach to dance making. These writings appear in Contact Quarterly, The MR Performance Journal, and Contredanse Publications in Bruxelles, and on his website: www.daniellepkoff.com
He lives on a piece of land in Vermont.
