Practice & Process with Sarah Bild & Susanna Hood
Days: Tuesday, July 28th - Thursday, July 30th
Times: Practice - 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM & Process - 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Costs: Practice per class $40 & Process per class $60
Class Description
This 3-day intensive will be divided into 3 hours of practice and 3 hours of creative
process. Pulling from their practices of Open Source Forms and Action Theater (see practice descriptions below), Susanna Hood and Sarah Bild will guide participants through physical and sensory awakening of the body/mind to prepare for creative practice. Inviting breath and imagery into the physical self, we will open ourselves to our physical and metaphorical environment and practice noticing, tending to and following creative impulses as they arise, opening a dialogue between inner experience and outer awareness. We will develop short studies, share them with the group and learn to speak about what we see. How do we move from the playground of creativity, the free generating of material to creating meaning in performance? How does one impulse invite another? How do we give shape to those impulses? What are the structural possibilities at our disposal? How do we embody them for full expression? How do we frame them in space and time? These are questions we will investigate and experience in the afternoon hours.
Instructor Biographies
Sarah Bild, dance/performance artist and choreographer, has been creating, teaching and performing in Montreal and throughout Canada for the last 30 years. She teaches composition at l’EDCM and is a certified teacher of Action Theater. Sarah Bild follows an instinctual stream of physical imagery to create deeply textured and organic works of dance. Through the use of viscerally embodied movement, voice and text, she creates visually impressive solo and group
works that raise questions about our human presence on this planet. Her recent in situ improvisational work became the basis for the making of three short films in collaboration with photographer Caroline Hayeur. Le Poids du lieu, a virtual choreography in 3 acts has enjoyed success in film festivals around the world.
https://sarahbild.ca/
Action Theater is a unique form of improvisational theatre developed by the American performance artist, Ruth Zaporah. Fundamental to the practice is an embodied presence in performance, where the experiencing of the body informs the content of the moment, moment by moment.
We work towards this embodiment through specifically guided improvisations focusing on formal tools as well as more abstract imagery, on vocalizations and use of words. These playful and rigorous exercises, which isolate and recombine movement, sound and language, broaden our range of improvisational skills helping us to become open and creative in the present moment. Always working from an embodied state, we develop spatial awareness and access to our imagination, crafting creative impulses into clear images, stories and dreamscapes. This technique turns the mind inside out, examines existing habits and opens up new possibilities. Working in solos, duets, trios and as an ensemble, we bring attention to the details of our physical choices, to the quality and range of our vocalizing. We approach speech and words as physical actions in building narratives.
Susanna Hood is a Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal-based dance artist, musician and educator. For over two decades, she has devoted her career to synthesizing voice and movement, creating intimate and sensual performances in both dance-theatre and improvised music contexts. Since 2004, Susanna has been teaching improvisation, composition, and voice and movement synthesis in various institutions and through independent workshops across Canada and internationally. She is a certified teacher (2010) and teacher trainer (2013) of
Open Source Forms (OSF), a practice fluidly expanded from Skinner Releasing Technique. In 2023 she completed the inaugural 2-year teacher training in Emotionally Integrated Voice with her teacher of 20 years, Fides Krucker.
http://susannahood.ca/teaching/
Open Source Forms (OSF) founded by American dance artist and master teacher Stephanie Skura in 2008 is a fluid expansion of Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), developed as a revolutionary way of learning by Joan Skinner in the 1960’s. The work focuses on the cross-fertilization of physical practice and creative process. It is guided by the philosophy that the source of creativity and physical wisdom is available in each of us and can be accessed through the shedding of limiting holding patterns.
Classes draw on the fundamental, introductory-level OSF material. The pedagogy is web-like and cumulative. Each session is unique and draws on modalities of touch, deep-state imagery, alignment and coordination-focused physical explorations, vocal exploration and scores for improvisation. The participant is offered practice tools that support resilient, ergonomically aligned, dynamically supple, and spatially responsive physicality while engaging their deep
creative and imaginal capacities. The sessions promote experiential learning, allowing for the timing of each individual’s process of discovery and integration, working both together and alone within community.
