Adult Dance Summer School: Contemporary Performance

This five-day summer school is designed for people aged 17+ interested in advancing skills in contemporary dance, improvisation and composition. It may be useful for anyone wishing pursue a pathway to further training or explore a career in performance.

The course is appropriate for people with previous dance experience including students of dance and working artists.

Students will have the opportunity to work individually and in groups, and will be guided through a challenging experience that stretches their own abilities.

By the end of this intensive short course, students should have:

• explored different approaches to creating and composing dance performance
• developed their understanding of body, movement and spacial awareness
• strengthened their contemporary dance technique
• had the opportunity to develop personal creative ideas individually and in groups

This inspiring and challenging summer school will be led by experienced dancer and choreographer Maite Delafin who teaches contemporary dance on the undergraduate drama programmes at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Each day will begin with practical floor work sessions based on organic movement fundamentals. Using breath and sound, students will warm-up and expand the joints and muscles, preparing the body and mind for work.

Experimenting with polarity and opposition within movement, students will explore planes, lines and curves of space, aiming to create organic and fluid dance. You will be led through physical and musical landscapes exploring different rhythms, dynamics and movement qualities.

Throughout the week students will gain an understanding of skeletal structure in order to develop sophisticated body awareness. During the creative sessions students will explore the range of movements of the joints within the possibilities and restrictions of the body’s anatomy. Individuals will be encouraged to play with possible combinations of movement, aiming to break body patterns and habits.

In a supportive and open environment you will explore and experiment using contemporary techniques to develop a personal language of dance. Working individually and within a group, students will also have the opportunity to try out their own ideas and experience other students' styles of working.

Text supplied by third party.