Interdisciplinary Workshops

Developed through a Field Research Project at Impulstanz, and with B.A. students at Stockholm University of the Arts, this choreographic workshop invites participants to visit a variety of concepts and sites—knowledge-transfer, queer theory, flea markets, silly archives, GIFS, and children's books—in order to study encounters with formalism, iconography, technique, clutter, ecology and historiography. We recall our embodied knowledge and share it with each other, and develop structures to reveal the experience of gathering and sending information, body to body. In the process, we keep track of the ways we learn, and experiment with interrupting right-wrong logics. How can we create together out of the divergent and intersecting embodied knowledge, tastes and experiences that are already in the room, existing in the vibrant space between us? Anticipating diverse histories and desires among participants, the workshop builds up an intimate creative process that flowers and decomposes. It is a process that can be used as a template for future choreographic composition, to inform interdisciplinary projects, and to craft performative experiences for audiences.

Previously Taught

Stockholm University of the Arts

BA Contemporary dance

Fall Semester 2023

Co-facilitated with choreographer Lenio Kaklea, the research project explores the relationship between embodied technique processes and choreographic composition. We recognize the influences that technical expressions can have on the creative process and choreography and vice versa. How can technical, embodied consciousness support the conceptual work involved in the creation of dance and performance? And how can a choreographic idea challenge our preconceived notions about technology and technical knowledge?

We explore how to structure a process that creates space for specific movement vocabulary and specific choreographic ideas and tasks, and work as a group to understand how embodied knowledge benefits our art. Since it is not always about dramaturgical skills, we view skill as an open question that leads us from experience to experience in our exploration. When is knowledge not essential to our project? When could it be further refined?

Technical development is taken here as a possibility, a circumstance, an opportunity to engage in a level of embodied skill that can contribute to the vitality of our performance and its perception. Furthermore, we view choreography as a set of tools and ideas that structure and challenge our ways of embodying materials and presenting them. Over the course of the week we share our discoveries, discuss our experiences learning, observing and showing them to each other and begin creating choreographies using our newly developed tools.

Previously Taught

ImPulstanz vienna international dance festival

Field Research Project

Summer 2023

This workshop is co-facilitated by Regina Baumgart. Together, we address students who are interested in developing their own movement practice–as a daily practice and training or in reference to a specific choreographic project and movement creation. Andrew and Regina support and accompany participants’ independent research by offering input and exchange on important aspects concerning movement practice and movement development. We share our daily practices and invite you to facilitate “input sessions” for the other participants as a way to become more familiar with your own ideas on sustainable physicalities and movement research for choreographic projects.

Previously Taught

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz (HZT berlin)

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Winter Semester 2020

15 week course

This workshop is co-facilitated with jazz pianist Assaf Fleischmann. Together, we invite students to experience the ways in which practices from two different areas—dance and music—meet in practice and theory. We are introduced to “standard knowledge” in both fields and invite students to experience overlapping techniques. We practice sequential and improvisational scores for musical instruments, voice, and body percussion, explore exercises set in rapidly changing meters, polyrhythm, syncopation, and learn about music history such as Stravinsky, Cage, jazz, and minimalism. Apart from embodying musical concepts and patterns, students are encouraged to draw from their own influences to generate movement material and choreography. As check-ins on our individual and collective processes, we hold conversations on the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Previously Taught

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz (HZT Berlin)

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2021

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Winter Semester 2021/22

15 week course

Borrowing its title from the novel by Joan Didion, this workshop gives students choreographic tools embedded in performative practices of reading bodies and writing space. Methodologically, we will consider various ways of seeing and projecting ephemeral information. We analyze editing techniques for film and text, visit choreography from a video performance by Ami Stewart and read All About Love by bell hooks to one another. Scores by Lisa Nelson add layers of presence and social construct that we learn and expand them by altering directives, discussing the effects, and performing new iterations for each other under conditions of our own devising.

Previously Taught

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz (HZT berlin)

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2019

2 week workshop

Intended for dancers interested in refining the theoretical and communal aspects of their dance and teaching practice, the workshop asks how a foundation in embodied, aesthetic knowledge can be used as a bridge to contemporary politics and critical thinking. Following the provocation of the workshop title, students consider how “contemporary” pertains to historical forms and how those traditions can re-align in the political landscape the dance field today.

Previously Taught

Zurich University of the Arts

MA Choreography

Fall Semester 2021

Taking routine dance practice as our starting point, the workshop dives into sociological and philosophical theories of technique. To build a theoretical framework about technique, we start by reading The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. From there we turn our focus to Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, and then to Michel Foucault's 1983 lecture, ‘The Culture of the Self.’ Together we build a conversation around the religious, economic, political, and philosophical debates about technique, seeking to bring in our current experiences with movement training into an embodied reflection on labor, time, and money.

Previously Taught

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz (HZT berlin)

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2020

15 week course

This workshop is co-facilitated with sound artist and performer Zen Jefferson. Together, we move with and against electronic sound, touching various themes of popular rhythms, improvised and emergent physical expressions, and codified aesthetics. We hold space for dialogues about our experience moving to Zen’s music, which is influenced by African rhythms and anti-racist statements and sentiments.

Previously Taught

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz (HZT Berlin)

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Winter Semester 2020

15 week course