January 10th – January 21st 2022
Wellington

Choreolab, our annual professional development event for freelance dance practitioners, will be in its 20th year in 2022! Applications are open now, so register your interest to start your year by making connections, exploring new practices and building on your unique interests.

Join Footnote and these four fantastic tutors for two summery weeks in Wellington to challenge and develop your practice in a supportive environment. As always, we are welcoming applications from professional dancers/performing artists and tertiary dance graduates.

Please be assured that we are closely monitoring Ministry of Health guidance with regards to COVID-19 and live events/gatherings. We will be adhering to all the requirements necessary to make sure the Choreolab environment is safe for all attendees and tutors.

Choreolab 2022 Workshops

Week One (two sessions per day): Katrina Bastian

Week One (one session per day): Julia Croft

Week Two (one session per day): Georgia Beechey-Gradwell

Week Two (two sessions per day): Elijah Kennar (ChoreoCo 2022 choreographer)

There will also be a number of social events to make the most of this focused time together and get to know each other outside of the studio. As always, but particularly important at the moment, this is a chance to spend time together, developing and deepening our relationships to one another.

ChoreoCo 2022:

As we have done for the last 9 years, we will be running our ChoreoCo project, but for 2022 it will be held later in the year instead of straight after Choreolab. ChoreoCo 2022 will provide a paid opportunity for five Choreolab participants to work with Elijah Kennar on the development of a new work. This will be a four week paid contract, from the 25th October – 11th November 2022 inclusive (including the week long performance season). Please indicate your interest in being involved with ChoreoCo 2022 through the application form.

Application Details

To apply for Choreolab please complete the application form by midnight on Sunday 14th November.

APPLY HERE

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

Applicants will be notified by Tuesday 16th November. Please note that you will need to pay to secure your place and payments are non-refundable (unless Ministry of Health guidelines and COVID Alert level setting prevent Choreolab from proceeding).

Choreolab 2021 fees are:
$250 (Earlybird fee if paid by November 24th) or $300 (to be paid in full by December 8th).

Workshop details

Week One: Katrina Bastian

Katrina f*$%ing LOVES dance! But she didn’t always…surviving for over 30 years, three continents, and several fiery personalities wore away at the delicacy of her relationship to dance. But no more! Now it’s all love for this amorphous, ephemeral, constant phenomenon. So what moves you? Do you give yourself permission to love dance? Do you give your dance room to flourish outside of the strictures of Eurocentric, ableist, heteronormative, and capitalist notions of the form? Is your dance truly evolving? If you’re reading this, somewhere there is a love for dance. Maybe just a flicker? Let’s create a bonfire together! In our time together we will work on nourishing our relationship to dance. Just as in all relationships, we have to show up. Everyday. Sometimes it’ll feel like ‘phoning it in’ and other times it’ll bring you to your knees in reverence. By focusing on the delicate balance between the athlete/artist/human trichotomy we aim to move towards being able to define dance in new and glorious and deeply unique ways. For. OURSELVES. and. EVERY. DAY___new.

Logistically:

The Body at Dance: We will be going deep around endurance, moving beyond familiar limits, a scientific curiosity for this expanding body-instrument. There will be sweat, there will be softness, there will be laughter.

The Community at Dance: We will begin our time together by creating shared community agreements so as to create a space that is open and affirming to each of us. We will aim towards setting and communicating boundaries, deep listening, and care. The goal is to create a space where each of us feels safe to call BS if and when the need arises, and that each of us has the tools to practice non confrontational language and deep listening. This is most important, before anything else, is you, the Person!

The Person at Dance: Through choreography, and improvisation scores we will try to tease out our very own uniquely yours virtuosity. The chance of any one human being born is 1 in 400 TRILLION, so like, let’s try to figure out what YOU and ONLY YOU can bring to dance. Ultimately, the most sustainable way to make a living as a dancer is by learning this – figuring out that one thing that you have that no one else has got.

Katrina is an endurance-based movement artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She was born in the traditional territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy (colonially Portland, ME, USA) and raised in the foothills of the Schwarzwald (Heimsheim, DE).

Her choreographies explore power, privilege, post-capitalist malaise, and feminine rage. Since 2020 she has worked with Footnote New Zealand Dance (ChoreoCo), Black Grace Dance Company, Dance Plant Collective, and Mary-Jane O’Reilly. Her work was presented in The Performance Arcade, Tempo Dance Festival, Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa, Auckland Fringe, and NZ Fringe.
She has had residencies through Movement Art Practice Christchurch, and Basement Theatre’s Ideas in Residence Programme. Katrina’s solo: ‘Soliloquy in Sweat’ won the ‘Best in NZ Fringe’, ‘Best Dance AKL Fringe’, and ‘Best Performance AKL Fringe’ awards in 2021. Before 2020 she lived and worked in Berlin, Germany where she received a Master’s Degree in Choreography from HZT-Berlin and worked with several renowned choreographers and companies.

Week One: Julia Croft

Playing at the edges of wildness, euphoria, disgust and sublime. Let’s make some beautiful chaos, let’s make a mess. Julia Croft will lead a series of experimental labs into materiality and slimy substance as performance material. This exploration is born out of a desire to fall in love with chaos. Over the lab we will create slime, ooze, goo, gases, solids and liquids that resist control and explore ways these shifting and wild materials can become the instigator for task based performance material. Building worlds that are shifting and transforming, can we allow these leaky and messy worlds lead us into performance worlds and body states? Can we build worlds out of materials? Can we duet with moving materials?

Over the course of the week we will make our own substance, find ways these can transform and build landscapes, and create short performance works in response, looking for the edges of wildness, control and states of change. How can we “desire disorder and disorder desire?” (Jack Halberstam). Inspired by the writing of Jane Bennet “Vibrant Matter” and Jack Halberstam “Wild Things.”

Julia Croft is a live artist and performance maker based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Julia’s practice draws on feminist and queer theory to create performance works that are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous, trying and failing at building a feminist future, worlding, becoming, making too much mess and too much noise, the works are deeply political and deeply sentimental. Her work is concerned with creating imaginative cracks in pervasive power structures, slippery and leaky spaces, the scientific-poetic and bad pop music.
Since 2015 she has created 10 full length works including 4 solo works: If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming, Power Ballad, Working On My Night Moves and Terrapolis. These works have toured extensively throughout NZ as well as Australia, the UK, Singapore and Canada, including to the Yard Theatre (UK), Battersea Arts Centre (UK), The Cultch (CAN) and The Esplanade.(SING) Working On My Night Moves was awarded a prestigious Total Theatre Award at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as an Auckland Theatre Award for Excellence. Her most recent solo Terrapolis was set to be performed in August 2020 but due to lockdowns will now premiere in 2022.
She works regularly as a teaching artist with young people in drama schools across Aotearoa. She was part of a 3 year arts residency curated by The Basement (NZ), Forest Fringe (UK) & West Kowloon Cultural District (HK) other residencies include Time Place Space residency through Arts House (Melbourne) and Mala Voadora in Porto, Portugal.

Week Two: Georgia Beechey-Gradwell

Our body as a landscape

Georgia’s sessions will acknowledge the ever-shifting nature of our bodies in response to inner and outer worlds. We will explore ourselves as landscapes in constant transition. We will allow our bodies to unfurl, unfold and unravel.

Our movement will traverse through space, memory, thought, sensation, connection, emotion.

We will begin each session with improvisations that deepen our sense of embodiment. Using imagery and somatic tools, we will attune the mind-body conversation. Through this we will notice the subtle shifts that occur within our movement when we focus our minds on specific provocations. We will then apply these learnings to fluid phrase-work to end each session.

Georgia is a freelance dancer, choreographer and teacher living on the Kāpiti Coast and working throughout Wellington. Having trained at Unitec and graduating in 2016 with a degree in Contemporary Dance, Georgia went on to work for Footnote New Zealand Dance as a full-time company member for 3 years.
During this time Georgia toured overseas to Switzerland, Berlin and China, performed in 6 national tours throughout Aotearoa, as well as performing in the World of Wearable Arts. Over these years Georgia worked with Ross McCormack, James O’Hara, Claire O’Neil, Emma Murray, Joshua Rutter, Sarah Foster-Sproull, Malia Johnston and many more. She now teaches throughout the Wellington region, runs her own production company and co-runs a movement initiative, Somatic Incubator.

Week Two: Elijah Kennar

Over the past six years I have been playing around with a choreographic score inspired by Trisha Brown’s Locus score. I call it the ‘Cube5000’ due to how different our approach, direction and dance backgrounds are. The ‘Cube5000’ works as a solo right through to an ensemble. This is a score for all dance experiences and movement capabilities, so this workshop is for you whether you are feeling rusty or top notch.

The following is a brief overview of what to expect on the different days.

Introduction to the Cube5000
– Self Motivated (Solo)

Guide5000
– Self Motivated and Guided motivation (Solo & Duo)

HopScotch5000
– Self Motivated floor work

Remix5000
– We play with a mixture of all three

Structure5000
– We build a little world of movements with material gathered from days prior

Each day begins with a game or a warm up movement task to bring our presence back into the room and to connect with each other. A quick moment to check in with yourself too, but also to have some fun. Following the warm up we will get into the main chunk of the workshop, which we build as a solo or duo, before performing them back to each other and continuing to build. There is an added layer of ‘Framing5000’ which we will find, discover and explore together within the space.

Elijah Kennar, a proud Samoan who also calls Aotearoa home. Elijah is a dancer, choreographer, up and coming photographer, and stunt performer. Introduced to dance through family gatherings, events and ‘Jump Jam’ in primary school. Dance was always around through the festive and mourning seasons.

Elijah is a freelancing graduate from the University of Auckland’s Dance Studies programme. Since graduating he has performed in Aotearoa’s leading dance companies, and collaborated with other amazing freelancers within Aotearoa and abroad. He enjoys both roles as dancer and choreographer. Within both roles he values collaboration as there is a sense of sculpting and ownership of the piece being created together. As choreographer Elijah wishes to create high quality works that are captivating and accessible for art viewers of all experience.

Elijah’s most recent work was Mealofa performed by New Zealand School of Dance students as part of their 2020 graduation season.

Choreolab 2022