Dancers, visual artists and musicians improvised together in the Oxford Brookes Drama Studio on 11 February at a ‘Meeting Points’ session. It was organised by musician Malcolm Atkins, and revived following the death of Ana Barbour – its founder.
Author: ijrkj
Practice dance ‘Valentine’ by Summertown Morris, Oxford
I visited Summertown Morris in Oxford on Wednesday 10 January to see them practicing a Morris dance called ‘Valentine’.
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Grounding and Fragile Balances with Joerg Hassmann Day 5
This is the fifth day of a five day winter intensive with Joerg Hassmann.
It’s the final day of the training course. We warm-up – mostly by lying on the floor and moving on our own. Joerg calls us to begin and we sit for five minutes in silence, meditating.
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Grounding and Fragile Balances with Joerg Hassmann Day 4
This is the fourth day of a five day winter intensive with Joerg Hassmann.
What is the relationship between our neck and our centre (where our centre is located just below our belly button)? We start by studying this while an artist draws our feet.
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Grounding and Fragile Balances with Joerg Hassmann Day 3
This is the third day of a five day winter intensive with Joerg Hassmann.
We sit on the ground with our legs crossed or similar, and we use the ball of our foot to massage our thigh; pressing it in; putting our weight onto it; we also use our hands for self massage too. This is the start to my favourite day of the intensive, and there’s a lot of material!
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Grounding and Fragile Balances with Joerg Hassmann Day 2
This is the second day of a five day winter intensive with Joerg Hassmann.
We take a cushion and lying on the floor with a cushion underneath us, we rock back and forth with our pelvis as a pivot point (fulcrum). The movement is back and forth in our pelvis and not rolling side to side. “Rocking is pushing and falling” says Joerg.
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Grounding and Fragile Balances with Joerg Hassmann Day 1
This is the first day of a five day winter intensive with Joerg Hassmann.
We sit on the floor in a circle – about 20 people – and our teacher Joerg Hassmann introduces the course. It’s the first day of a five day intensive training at the Somatische Akademie in Berlin called Grounding and Fragile Balances.
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Library Dance
We had a fantastic time at our Library Dance on 19 December 2017 in Oxford’s Central Library at the Westgate Centre. The library had recently reopened after a long closure while the Westgate Centre was rebuilt and renovated. Our dance celebrated its reopening.
Class with K.J. Holmes on 16 December 2017
We begin, sat in a circle of perhaps 60 people on the floor of the sports hall at Caxton House where K.J. Holmes tells us that we have wings in our hands – between our fingers, in our shoulders and later she says, in our eyes. But it’s only after class the I understand her: she shows me her notes with an anatomical picture of our shoulder bones – scapulas, and says to me – those are wings.
Three Dancers, Two Chairs (Library Dance workshop)
We held a Library Dance workshop today (Sunday 17 December) at Oxford Contact Dance. Here’s one of the investigations with Naomi Morris, Lizzy Spight and Julie Nicholls: three dances, two chairs. Oh yes, and books!
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