Dance - In The Making​

 

December 14, 2-5pm

Ashburton Arts Centre

15 West St, Devon, TQ13 7DT

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£18 / concessions £12 per workshop

RSVP: ysnaith@icloud.com​​​​​​​​​​​

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As we dance with an awareness of our relationship to other moving bodies in time, space, sound, music and our environment, we are making intuitive choices, moment to moment, creating the dance as we go along. This  class invites participants to tune their awareness with curiosity, both individually and as a collective, to ‘composing in the moment’. We engage attentively in a creative practice  that opens space for dance-making with heightened senses, expanded creativity, deeply felt embodiment and playful spontaneity. 

 

Classes and workshops will begin with a guided improvisational warmup, tuning our attention to our internal landscapes and anatomical architectures through both movement and stillness; opening, softening, releasing, lengthening, expanding, surrendering to gravity, elevating with levity, listening and responding to sensation as we move and embody somatic information and images. 

 

As we extend our awareness out to the collective and the space, participants are guided to playfully build connections through dancing in imaginative and creative ways, consciously developing spontaneous, relational choice making. Time is spent both dancing and witnessing, sharing feedback and experiences, leading to the practice of joyful emergent dances that hold their own internal logic, poetry, form and meaningfulness.

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Testimonials:

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“Yolande is a visionary, and 100% committed to complex processes that bring about highly original performance works. As a collaborator, she values individuals from many different backgrounds in order to create worlds “out of the ether” and into our hearts” . . . . .“Working with Yolande as a performer is like boarding a very stable train with a very trustworthy conductor. The journey will be exciting, and you will find yourself arriving at many different destinations, always awarded with depth of knowledge and performance ability along the way.”

Marcos Duran, UC San Diego Dance MFA Alumni, Dance Theatre producer and educator.

 

“Yolande is a virtuoso at finding and creating connections between ideas, images, words, and movement. It has been deeply satisfying to work in creative processes that are so rich and immersive”

Gina Bolles Soreneson, Choreographer / Educator 

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"Yolande's teaching is transformative. Fifteen years later, I still find myself regularly revisiting artistic processes that she introduced. Her ability to perceive the world around her as flourishing with creative potential is magical. But her ability to structure that raw potential into rich artistic processes that challenge, rewire, and delight her students is even more so".

Kyle Sorenesen, UC San Diego Dance MFA Alumni, Choreographer / Educator / Dance Film-maker

 

"Yolande is a magical dance maker. Her creative processes offer rich portals for movement explorations. I have known Yolande for 20 years and cherish my kinesthetic memories in the many pieces and worlds she created for me as a dancer in San Diego. As a professor and colleague at UCSD she guided her students with kindness and innovative ways of thinking about space, time, elemental connections, and the expansive possibilities of human movement. Yolande is a well loved teacher and guide who will spark your creativity and imagination".

Alison D. Smith - dancer and embodiment guide. 

 

"I have learned so much from Yolande over a decade of dance experiences together.  Being a part of her process firsthand in both rehearsals and classes has given me infinite insights into my own dancing and making which I share in my own classes and processes". Sadie Weinberg - dancer, choreographer, educator, artistic director of LITVAKdance

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“I’m being completely honest when I say that having Yolande Snaith as a teacher and mentor during my grad school years, was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. She dramatically shifted and liberated my conception of choreography and dance making. It is because of her gentle, imaginative, resourceful and rigorous guidance that I came face to face with what it means to be a human being and a movement artist in the highest sense. I always like to say that my work with Yolande reconciled me with metaphor and introduced me to the depths of the improvisational state. That open space of immense presence and vast possibility. Her teachings continue to support and inform my daily and creative life today. “

Paulina Colmenares, Choreographer, Dance Professor.

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"Yolande offered her artistry, theatricality, love of movement, artistic conviction and curiosity through her character and sensibility. She gave me permission by way of living example to hone and live inside my own artistic processes and curiosity, to continuously seek out and listen to my aesthetic voice. When I reflect on my experiences being involved as a performer in some of Yolande's Choreographies; I could describe propositions of thematic specificity asking me to embody a state, a character, a way of being, dancing inside continuous moving patterns; becoming layered; a dancing escher meets a gothic mythic ritual space. I often found myself in something peculiar and tender, costumed in layers and textures in fabrics that holistically supported a whimsy and chaos and lightness of being that my experience of being in her works imbued. Yolande always encouraged my artistic curiosity and multidisciplinary interests and I am so very grateful and honored for my time working, studying and considering artistic practices with her at UCSD and through time continued within the larger San Diego dance community, as a collaborator and friend".

​Emily Aust, Dance  maker, and Reiki practitioner.