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ACI Festival 2012 : ANIMAL - 2 dance improvisation performances with Daniel Lepkoff

(45 minutes each)
A performance not to be missed


Part of the OIKOS Contact Improvisation Festival of Montreal


“As a maker of dances, a designer of theater and an improvising performer I am not specifically interested in presenting "dance" movement on the stage. What is happening at any moment I see as possible material that can be placed in a dance frame. My work, in the studio and on the stage, is a practice of living, in movement and in stillness. Noticing the details of my experience, understanding it’s inner logic and sensing it’s outer form.

Each of us exists in an on-going physical dialogue with our environment, tuning to the details and nuance in our own and each others’ movement behavior, and to the conditions of our present moment. We observe, we feel and we act. We create our own images and construct our own understandings. Ordinarily this activity in unconscious.

In the theater I want to stimulate audience and performer alike to consciously and actively form their own images, and so my work is designed not to tell the audience what it is they are looking at. Inside of a moment of disorientation of not knowing lies an opportunity for a person in the theater to create their own story; In these times we are surrounded by media images designed by others to manipulate our attention and control what we know and do not know. As an artist the performance event offers me an opportunity to create empty space.”

– Daniel Lepkoff

At Studio 303,

372 Ste-Catherine West street, Montreal

Friday, Nov 30, at 7 PM & at 9 PM

Max 80 people per show.

Price : 20$ (fair)/15$ regular/12$ student

Information : www.studio303.ca

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alt="(JPG)" />Crédits : Andre Andreev, AndreinLA@gmail.com (from a performance of "White Noise’ Jan. 2006 - Highways, LA)

Bio:

Daniel Lepkoff is a dancer, dance maker, improvising performer, teacher, and writer. His work looks at all movement as a finely tuned physical dialogue with the environment and explores the form and composition of this interaction as a language for making dances. He has developed techniques based on this approach that form a dance practice as well as a research into moving and living in the world. He is known for his commitment to composing dance works that bring the process of living movement onto the stage.

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Starting in the early ’70’s Daniel was at the center of the development of Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson and of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. Throughout the ’70’s and 80’s he traveled extensively; actively teaching, performing and exposing these new ideas worldwide.

He was one of the founders of Movement Research in NYC (1975). Together with Mary Overlie, Wendell Beavers, Cynthia Hedstrom and Christina Svane, among others; he played an active role in defining the initial conception of this seminal organization: designing new programs, curating events, teaching regular classes and offering intensive workshops.

Living in New York City in the ’80’s Daniel performed in the works of several choreographers including: Trisha Brown, Mary Overlie, Judy Padow, & Nancy Topf. In his own solo and group work he experimented with the elements of voice, text, film & video, photography, interactions with physical objects, and constructing sets for performance.

From 1982 to 1987 he was a member of the New York based improvisational performance ensemble “Channel Z”. Channel-Z’s work investigated the spontaneous, focused, and deeply physical movement states occurring in Contact Improvisation and developed the compositional potential of this approach to address all aspects of theater.

Over the years Daniel has engaged in several long term and important collaborations with other performing artists including: Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton; Paul Langland, Saira Blanche Theater in Moscow (Oleg Soulimenko and Andrej Andrianov), Hungarian experimental musician Dora Attila and Japanese dancer, Sakura Shimada, among others.

He has published numerous articles articulating concepts that are central to his approach to dance making. These writings appear in Contact Quarterly, The MR Performance Journal, and Contredanse Publications in Bruxelles.

He has an ongoing interest in sound and video compositions, photography, singing and playing the guitar, mathematics, & house building.

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