Footnote Intensive 2021

Calling all freelance dancers and makers! We have spaces available in our 2021 professional development Intensive, and this is your invitation to join us, along with workshop facilitators Alexa Wilson and Matte Roffe. This Intensive was originally scheduled last year but postponed for obvious reasons, so we’re excited to be going ahead with it this year!

This week-long professional development event is designed for you to have the space to explore and grow in your practice, through workshops facilitated by acclaimed New Zealand experimental choreographer, performance artist, video creator, writer and curator, Alexa Wilson. Alexa will lead participants through sessions focussing on transformation within movement, choreography and collaboration. Matte Roffe, accomplished dancer/performer and past Australian Dance Theatre company member, will set participants up for the day through his dynamic classes that explore the full potential of the body in a deeply considered way. Due to the difficulties faced by artists in this current climate, we are offering this year’s Intensive at a lower price than usual. And thanks to support from Wellington City Council, we are also thrilled to be hosting the Intensive at the Northland Memorial Community Centre this year.

Monday 22nd March – Friday 26th March (inclusive)

Northland Memorial Community Centre
5 Woburn Road, Northland, Wellington

There are limited spaces available for this Intensive, so please register your expression of interest by completing the simple online application form below by Sunday 14th February.

Please email Artistic Liaison Anita Hunziker if you have any questions – anita@footnote.org.nz

Workshops

Transformation workshop with Alexa Wilson

We will be working with the theme of transformation. We will consider ways in which movement, choreography, performance, collaboration, solos, ritual and relational performance can be transformative.
We will also consider together how working with the body, with motion, collectivity in mind, and with identities can be politically framed as transformative.

We will work with a range of approaches and tasks, moving between bringing personal transformations (or realisations/interests emerging), and the context of political / collective transformation from the recent lockdown into our performance and dance practices. We will work with what has emerged during this transformative time in lockdown as interesting to us to work creatively with in exchange.

These themes will be guided to develop solo material, as well as group directed group offers, both quickly as conceptual propositions, and moving toward open improvisations if desired. These will move organically out of personal or individual material around this theme and what has emerged over this time, into shared interests with others.

Alexa Wilson

Alexa Wilson is a New Zealand choreographer who has been based in Berlin for the last 10 years. She has presented performance and video works in Berlin, NYC, Vienna, Hamburg, Brussels, London, Stockholm, Zurich, Beijing, India, Vancouver, Melbourne and throughout Nz. In Nz she has created 2 full length works on Footnote New Zealand Dance, The Status of Being (2014), and The Dark Light (2017). She has won awards for Weg: A-Way (2011, 4 Auckland Fringe Awards, incl. Auckland Arts Festival Award), Toxic White Elephant Shock (2009, CNZ funded, Tup Lang Award) and mentioned in Nz Listener Magic Box (2004, “Best Emerging Contemporary Choreography”).
She has created works on Touch Compass (Acquisitions 06), and Unitec’s SPASA and has taught choreography at Unitec, NZSD, Auckland University and film theory at MIT. She has curated Morni Hills Performance Residency (2 months) in India, 2017, and Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa 2019/20. She has danced for choreographers Douglas Wright, Malia Johnston, Lisa Densem, Anna Bate. She has a BPSA from Unitec, BA and MA from Auckland University (Film), PG Dip Fine Arts fromTransart Institute Berlin/NYC and MPhil from AUT in Art and Design. She will publish her first book Theatre of Ocean in 2020.

Technique Class

Approach & Intent with Matte Roffe

My contemporary based technique class focuses on approach and intent.

I am at a pivotal point in my career where I am driven by listening to my body’s needs and wants. My class is all about creating space, length and enjoyment in the body; pushing it to its full capacity and potential but in an holistic and considered way.

Class should be about the discovery and curiosity of the body, being driven by sensation rather than the superficial facade of how it looks. It’s all about how you do something, not what you do. Form, free form, structure and conscious-considered chaos.

I think of my class like a circle, starting very minimal and it being about the breath, filling the vessel and emptying the vessel. As we move into more dynamic and full bodied movements, we consider how to keep this idea of filling and emptying the vessel throughout the breath expansion and contraction.

My class is about exploring what your body is craving and surrendering into that indulgence of what it needs in that exact moment. Listen to your body, if it feels good it is good.

Matte Roffe

Matte Roffe is professional dancer who trained at Ev & Bow in NSW and the New Zealand School of Dance, where he performed in numerous works by choreographers including Jiří Kylián, Ross McCormack and Lina Limosani. At the 2011 Sydney Festival he performed in the Inside Out Triple bill with youMOVE’s Thinking about Forever, directed by Kay Armstrong.

Matte graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance in 2012 and joined Australian Dance Theatre’s ensemble in November 2012. In 2013 Matte performed in the three-month European tour of Proximity, the Australian tour of G, Proximity at the Arts Centre Melbourne and the premiere of Daniel Jaber’s Nought. In 2014 Matte performed in ADT’s European tour of Proximity, the world premiere season of Multiverse and return Adelaide season of Proximity. In 2015 he travelled with the company to France and Spain, performing in the European premiere tour of Multiverse. He joined the company on subsequent Multiverse tours to Europe later in 2015 to France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. He also performed in the Australian national tour of Be Your Self. In 2016 Matte performed in the world premiere seasons of Habitus at the Adelaide Festival of Arts and The Beginning of Nature at WOMADelaide. Later that year he performed in the Australian premiere season of Objekt and was a featured choreographer and dancer in ADT’s return season of Ignition. His piece WOOLF! was inspired by the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), directed by Mike Nichols, originally based on the 1962 play by Edward Albee.

In 2017 Matte performed in Garry Stewart’s Doppelganger, a piece featured as part of the exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia – Versus Rodin: bodies across space and time, followed by the Melbourne Premiere season of Garry Stewart’s Be Your Self and the Australian national tour of Be Your Self Redux throughout VIC, NSW and QLD. Later that year he performed in the premiere season of The Beginning of Nature in Colombia, South America. In 2018, Matte performed in the Australian national tour of The Beginning of Nature, across SA, NT, WA, NSW and TAS and international tour throughout Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium. In 2019, Matte travelled to New York to perform The Beginning of Nature at the Joyce Theatre, and was apart of Jacobs Pillow residence for Supernature. Matte also performed in the world premiere of North/South a double bill Choreographed by Garry Stewart, and Ina Christel Johannese in September 2019.