Workshop to bring wrestling and vocal technique in dialogue (Professional Scenic Artists)
A project by Alanna Kraaijeveld, in collaboration with the CCOV
Two workshop days: Saturday July 16 and 23, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.
DAY 1: WRESTLE
Saturday July 16, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.
This session is devoted to study wrestling technique. Wrestling here will underpin exploration of compactness, compression, and pressure as useful and necessary qualities for movement practice. Alanna facilitates the session. She has been working with former Olympian and world champion wrestler Guivi Sissaouri to bring participant artists in connection with:
– a low working position or stance
– a light touch (quality)
– speed, timing, especially in relation to a partner
– coordination, anticipation, assertion in unpredictable situations
– repetition
DAY 2: SOUND AND VOICE meets WRESTLE
Saturday July 23, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.
“This session will introduce participant artists to vocal technique, and bring voice practice in dialogue with wrestling. Voice work will be facilitated by Susanna Hood, and will underpin our exploration of the value of openness as it relates to practice.”
CONTEXT
From Alanna Kraaijeveld :
The idea for the workshop series arose from a desire to explore compression and compactness as a generative and necessary skill in movement technique.
I took voice lessons with Susanna Hood during the pandemic. Much of the sessions I spent sprawled on the floor, working to open my channels: to create links between all parts of my body, to open my face, to move fluids, to feel movements, and so on. It occurred to me how much training – technical, creative – is oriented toward cultivating openness in the practitioner. But, I thought, where is the pressure? When and how do we honor compression, compactness… essentially, being closed?
I am reminded of a sound byte from one of Jozef Frucek’s Fighting Monkey talks:
“Sometimes you need to be open, sometimes you need to be closed.”
At some point in the session with Susanna she had us sing the word ‘No’, here an alternative to the word ‘Yes’ we had often sung. Yes, I thought, the intention to be closed is at work, let us highlight its existence and utility.
BIO Alanna Kraaijeveld
Alanna Kraaijeveld is a dance artist who performs, improvises, instructs and creates. Her approach is centered on context driven, collaborative practices. She is curious about how specificity of relationship has potential to motivate intention, movement and meaning. She embraces improvisation, and is compelled by its dynamic capability. She makes space for both plainness and blurriness in her art.
BIO Susanna Hood
Susanna Hood is a Montreal-based dance artist, musician and educator. For over two decades, she has devoted her career to synthesizing voice and movement within her dynamic practice, creating intimate, sensual and raw performances both in dance-theatre contexts as well as in the context of improvised music. Since 2004, Susanna has been teaching improvisation, composition, and voice and movement synthesis in various institutions and through independent workshops across Canada and internationally. Since 2012 Susanna has become a teacher trainer of Open Source Forms (OSF), a practice fluidly expanded from and combining the principles of the Skinner Releasing Technique with the varied and developing practices of its teachers. She is also currently pursuing teacher certification in Emotionally Integrated Voice with her teacher of 20 years, Fides Krucker.
susannahood.ca/teaching