Choreolab 2019

Applications have now closed for Choreolab 2019.


January 15th – January 26th 2019
Te Auaha, Wellington

Start your year in the best way possible.

Footnote New Zealand Dance Choreolab is firmly established as the most significant professional development event for dance practitioners in New Zealand, drawing artists from around the country and overseas to Wellington each summer.

We are delighted to announce the tutors leading the workshops for 2019. They are Alex Leonhartsberger, Edivaldo Ernesto, Julia Harvie and Stuart Lloyd-Harris. Join Footnote and these fantastic tutors for two weeks in Wellington to challenge and develop your practice in a supportive environment.


Week One and Two: Depth Movement with Edivaldo Ernesto

Week One: Alex Leonhartsberger

Week Two: Julia Harvie and Stuart Lloyd-Harris (ChoreoCo choreographers)

As always, Footnote will make evening lab time available for participants to explore their ideas, and there will be a number of social and networking events, including the infamous Choreolab boat trip.

Following on from our sold out ChoreoCo seasons in 2017 and 2018, ChoreoCo 2019 will provide a paid opportunity for five Choreolab participants to work with Julia and Stuart on the development of a new work titled Nobody hears the axe fall. This will be a four week paid contract, from the 11th February to the 10th of March (including the week long performance season as part of the New Zealand Fringe Festival).

To apply for Choreolab 2019 please complete the application form (click here) by 5pm on Wednesday 7th November. Please also indicate whether you are interested in being considered for ChoreoCo 2019.

If you have any questions about the application process, Choreolab or ChoreoCo, please email anita@footnote.org.nz

Choreolab 2019 fees are:
$250 (Earlybird fee if paid by November 17th) or $300 (to be paid in full by December 15th).


Workshop details

Week One and Two: Depth Movement with Edivaldo Ernesto

This is an intense and dense group dynamic class. It is about energy, about constantly challenging your limits. It is about understanding what defines you as a dancer and pushing those boundaries over and over again. Allowing the environment to influence your dancing skills, refining tools to create new movement qualities and new rhythms. Digging deeper inside the range of your own personal dance vocabulary, becoming anyone or anything. Working with partnering, multi- directional, micro- narrative movement to transform as a whole group. Learning how to effectively be unpredictable, how to recycle energy, how to use the body as your primary tool.

About Edivaldo Ernesto:
Edivaldo Ernesto (Mozambique/DE), Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer, improvisation expert. Mozambican background and western Africa traditional dance influence. Performances, improvisations, assistant teacher for Flying Low and Passing Through technique with David Zambrano, Investigation and collaboration with Judith Sánchez Ruiz. Creator and developer of his: “Depth Movement” Workshop and “Next Level”, teaching across Europe, North America, South America, Asia. Former member of Sasha Waltz and Guests company.

Week One: Alex Leonhartsberger

How do we take the ‘everything’ that’s in our heads and make all of that into some kind of movement performance – some kind of ‘one thing’. This workshop is going make inroads into that little conundrum. This workshop will be a choreographic exploration of ritual, state and movement. My focus will be on supporting participants in generating their own materials through dreaming & inventing personal rituals. Drawing heavily on somatic and choreographic processes the work will look at both personal and abstract ways of working. Participants will be encouraged to use interaction and feedback to make their own material whilst really digging to feed personal experience into artistic form. There may opportunity for the material to be developed even further into group collaborations.

About Alex Leonhartsberger:
Alex was born in Vienna, Austria and trained at the Austrian Ballet School of the State Opera in Vienna. He then went freelancing for many different choreographers and companies around the globe including: Volksoper Wien, Tanztheater Wien, Landestheater Linz, Fabulous Beast Dance Theater, Royal New
Zealand Ballet, Michael Parmenter, Australian Dance Theater, Raewyn Hill, Alyx Duncan, Daniel Belton, The Playground, Maria Dabrowska, Mia Mason, Jo Randerson, WoW(Malia Johnston), New Zealand Dance Company, Ross McCormack, Douglas Wright and Teac Damsa. In the other part of his life he works as a fabricator and machinist in workshops for cinematic services and has been part of crew on film sets such as the Vintner’s Luck, the Patriarch Mahana, Jean Batten and most recently the Legends of Monkey.

Week Two: Julia Harvie and Stuart Lloyd-Harris

The Third Space: Permeating the membrane between audience and performer

Julia and Stuart’s current interest addresses how to give audience an active role in their experience of performance. This can range from subtle spatial considerations to direct instructions. This workshop will look at how to activate and integrate audience dynamics and outcomes. We will look at communication tools, spatial design and systems that can enable exchange that gives meaning to the work. This can range from a gentle shift in power to handing over control to the audience. How can we give audience agency and avoid alienating them? How do we ensure safety and consent is kept in mind for both performers and audience and retain conceptual integrity?

About Julia Harvie:
Julia Harvie graduated from UNITEC in 2003 with a BPSA in Contemporary Dance. Julia’s practice involves multidisciplinary collaborations, civic engagement, architecture and improvisation. She tends towards challenging dominant power structures through non-theatrical settings which led to richer consideration of audience perspective and the female body as a powerful political site. Her work has toured throughout New Zealand and has been presented in Taiwan and Australia. She has been awarded Most Outstanding Performer of the NZ Fringe, Best Dance at the Dunedin Fringe and Listener’s NZ Best Female Contemporary Dancer in 2008. Julia Harvie CV (2).pdf

Julia has worked for a wide range or New Zealand’s foremost choreographers. In recent years she has presented Elephant Skin with Footnote in 2016, she was a guest artist at Dance in Vancouver and in RUSHES at the NZ International Arts Festival in 2018. She has collaborated with The Physics Room for Innocent Bystanders – seven civic sites, seven days, seven improvised performances and for Biljana Popovic’s Synthetic Baby whereby she is wired up and hacked by electronic pulses. She has performed at CoCA for Peter Robinson’s Fieldwork and will collaborate with Pauline Rhodes again later in 2018. She continues her work as Artistic Director of Movement Art Practice(MAP), running classes, workshops and residencies, providing artists with platforms for engagement with their peers and community.

About Stuart Lloyd-Harris:
Stuart Lloyd-Harris is a visual artist based in Christchurch, New Zealand. His practice spans lighting and set design, sculpture, photography and filmmaking. In 1998 Stuart gained a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University. His experience working with film and photographic lighting allowed him to expand into theatrical lighting design where he worked with performance artists, dancers and musicians like Amy Winehouse, Sinead O’Conor and Jamiroquai amongst others.

Since moving to Christchurch Stuart has expanded into more three dimensional design work, creating and shaping audience experience, exploring the unconventional and avant-garde and the use of structural design as choreographic imperative.

Julia Harvie & Stuart Lloyd-Harris Collab:
Stuart and Julia have been collaborating to create installation, image and performance for the last four years. Drawing on their different backgrounds they are focussed on creating unique audience experiences, working to challenge the established audience-performer paradigm and examine the transpersonal space.

Their most recent choreographic collaboration being a performance of Iannis Xenakis’ avant garde opera, Oresteia which included a 15 piece ensemble and 40 performers for the Christchurch Arts Festival. Other works have included, Nesticity a 6-hour performance installation for the Christchurch Festival of Transitional Architecture 2016, Democratic Ensemble, a performance installation for Making Space at Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) and How we used to live in the future a photographic work exhibited at CoCA and Shared Lines in Wellington.

Brynne Tasker-Poland