BIO
As a teacher, I share my inquiry of what it is to be a thinking, feeling, moving subject in this world. I do that through setting up a dialogue with ourselves and our environment in which we are empowered to be our own experts. I specialise in teaching the application of somatic approaches to contemporary dance practices. I’m also interested in how this work can be applied wider society.
I am certified to teach the Feldenkrais Method® and the Body And Earth work developed by Andrea Olsen and Caryn McHose. I studied for two years at SNDO Amsterdam and have an MA in Dance Pedagogy. I made extensive studies of Authentic Movement, Movement Shiatsu, Body Mind Centering and experiential anatomy.
I have been dancing Contact Improvisation since 1991 and was part of the group of regular students who studied with Nancy Stark Smith throughout the 1990s while she was developing what eventually became known as the UnderScore.
Laterly, I have been studying Biotensegrity, a new paradigm of anatomy which is arising from within the medical world, and teaching classes exploring its embodiment.
I lived in Finland from 2001 to 2019. I moved to Vienna in Austria in 2019 where I currently live.
Languages of Sensation – Somatic approaches to contact improvisation
We will move between exercises aiming to clarify the sensations which lie at the heart of CI and exploring improvisational structures that uncover different types of CI vocabulary.
The idea of this approach is to minimise the teaching of set material (moves, tricks, etc) and instead to maximise the opportunities of participants to discover material for themselves through their own research and exploration.
Very simply, I set up calm and simple experiments in which we can experience a range of sensations without any demand to move very much. And then we dance a lot. Often there are unusual rules for the dances. Sometimes there are none and you can improvise freely.
While the course aims to support the development of our CI movement vocabulary, it does so through enriching the sensory skills that enable us to improvise with each other.
In this way it serves as both a solid introduction to the practice of CI for beginners, while simultaneously challenging experienced contact dancers to abandon habitual pathways and truly improvise from the present moment.