Qi Gong with Davida Monk
Days: Monday - Saturday
Dates: Oct. 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
Times: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Cost: $18 a class
Class Description:
These classes focus on developing the skills of recognizing, sensing, cultivating and circulating energy. Overall, the work reduces stress and increases vitality. The practice integrates and harmonizes the body, emotion and mind: empowering the imagination, increasing creative potential, lifting the heart and vitalizing the body. The material is based on Master Lee Holden’s Qi Gong techniques. Classes are one hour in duration, including physical warmups and Qi Gong flow movement patterns and ending with a short meditation.
Instructor Biography:
Davida Monk, Dance Artist
Davida Monk began her professional career in 1985 with Le Groupe de la Place Royale of Ottawa, and was instrumental in the development of Canada’s first professional contemporary dance laboratory for choreographic development, Le Groupe Dance Lab. Monk’s works have been presented across Canada and in Europe.
In her current project Songs Without Words she has created 20 distinct solos which are available for viewing, complete with collaborator comments, studio notes and artists responses at www.m-body.ca. In addition to performing these works, Monk is in the process of giving them to other emerging and mature dance artists for their own performance repertoires. The next phases of Songs Without Words will also include productions of reimagined combinations of the SWW body of work.
Monk has taught dance technique, creative process and choreography in a wide variety of contexts and has danced for and collaborated with many Canadian choreographers and artists of other disciplines. She became a Certified Holden Qi Gong Instructor in 2023. The recipient of awards for choreographic development and touring from the University of Calgary, Calgary Arts Development, and Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Centre, Monk directed Calgary’s Dancers’ Studio West, an organization dedicated to the development of choreographers from 2008 – 2018. Monk is Associate Professor Emerita (University of Calgary), and Artistic Director of M-Body, dedicated to the development of her own works, since 2004.
