Footnote New Zealand Dance Intensive: Research and Development
Footnote’s second annual Intensive provides an opportunity to work with Sarah Foster-Sproull, Claire O’Neil, and Balazs Busa for a week-long professional development workshop. Dive into the worlds of these fantastic tutors to draw out new ideas for your own practice. Push boundaries, go deeper and discover new processes to complement your work. Places are limited so email anita@footnote.org.nz asap to find out more and register.
Where: Tarrant Dance Studios, 125 Cuba St, Wellington
When: Mon 31 July – Fri 4 August (inc)
Time: 9am – 5pm
Cost: Only $150
Sarah Foster-Sproull: Optimising the dancer’s experience
Through re-visioning the dancer as a ‘consumer’ of a choreographic service, Sarah Foster-Sproull’s workshop series explores how we might re-imagine the design, implementation, and exploration of choreographic ‘tasking’. Participants will investigate improvisational, structured, and state-based tasks designed to reach the heart of the dancer through exploring the notion of an ‘optimal experience’. What? Fun times, good vibes, and deconstructing hierarchies.
Claire O’Neil: Whizz, Bang, Boing and other matters…
This workshop intensive delves into physical laws derived from studies of matter and motion. In search of a ‘movement ecology’, where our biophysics and environment interact, develop and adapt, the intention is to search for systems (vocabularies) derived from the science of physics in an open-ended exploration. Energy forces, gravitational pulls, patterning, motion analysis, explosions, projectiles, and the theory of relativity are impulses to build a natural niche; a movement community that supports life, regeneration, and possible metamorphosis.
Balazs Busa: Morning class
A morning class investigation into the way animals move, adapt and behave. In this class we will explore animalistic floor work patterns that will be combined and used in our movement phrases through space.
Tutor biographies
Sarah Foster-Sproull
Sarah Foster-Sproull is the Artistic Director of Foster Group and Creative New Zealand’s Choreographic Fellow for 2017-2019. She has choreographic relationships with Footnote New Zealand Dance (Wellington), Okareka Dance Company (Auckland), Co3 (Perth), Tamsyn Russell (Edinburgh), T.H.E. (Singapore), Lobos Art Collective (Los Angeles), and VOU (Fiji). In addition, she has recently completed a Masters in Dance Studies from the University of Auckland. Sarah’s choreographic research traverses large scale works for up to 35 performers, to intimate performances involving one or two dancers, and in 2015 she was one of five choreographers selected internationally by Crystal Pite to participate in the Craft of Embodiment workshop in Banff, Canada.
Claire O’Neil
Claire O’Neil is a dance maker, researcher, educator and performing artist with a Masters in Dance from the University of Auckland. She has built her international contemporary dance career through working with New Zealand choreographers such as Douglas Wright, Michael Parmeter, Shona McCullagh, Ross McCormack, Australian-based Sue Healy and Desoxy Theatre, and Belgian choreographers Michele Noiret and Hans van den Broeck, among others.
Claire established Fidget Collective in 2001 and has produced and toured several independent dance works in Belgium, Canada, Reunion Island and New Zealand. She has choreographed for Footnote New Zealand Dance, Stalker Theatre Company, Red Leap Theatre, Unitec Performing Arts, Whitirea Performing Arts, and the New Zealand School of Dance. Her teaching credits include work with Wim VandeKeybus/Ultima Vez, The Paris Opera, Rosas Dance Company, Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods, Norwegian Theatre Academy, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Cie. Philippe Découfflé, Ballet Preljocaj, IndepenDance and the New Zealand Dance Company. She is featured in Sue Healey’s full-length documentary dance film Virtuosi.
Balazs Busa
Born in Kiskunhalas, Hungary, Balázs Busa graduated from Budapest University. In 2010 he was accepted to P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, graduating in 2014. During his years in P.A.R.T.S. he created two solos, SniFF SNIff and buBBle and Erinyes. He also worked with Eleonore Valere Lachky (FR/BE) and performed Whirling at the Dansa Péi festival. Since 2015 he has been working on a project with Rosas called Work/ Travail/Arbeid which is a recreation of the Vortex Temporum (made by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/BE). He has taught contemporary dance in Slovakia and Slovenia. In collaboration with James O’Hara, he has led workshops in Perth and Montreal and made the work The Roaring Silence of a Never Ending Story for the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts.