Improvisation
WS by Katie Duck
Febr 16-18, 2018

KATIE DUCK : IMPROVISATION
Workshop in Performance Research and improvisational Compositions

Berlin, February 16-18, 2018
Tanzfabrik Berlin (Kreuzberg)

Friday 16.2.: 18-21h
Saturday 17.2.: 10-13h + 14-17h
Sunday 18.2.: 10-13h + 15-17h + 18-19h Public Showing
Total teaching time: 15h + Showing

Katie Duck has been investigating theater, dance and music with live performance for over 30 years. In her workshop, she takes a microscopic view on the role improvisation plays in a live performance combining her background in the performing arts with her curiosity for advances in brain studies, music and movement research. Read more in the workshop description below…

SHOWING:
For the participants is a voluntary opportunity to show the material developed in the workshop to the public in an informal showing at the end of the weekend, Sunday at 6:00 pm.

COST:
Early bird: 125€ (money transfer until January 19, 2018),
thereafter: 165€

YOUR REGISTRATION:
For registration details and workshop questions please contact me by e-mail at xs4jan@gmx.de

FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/events/…

VIDEOS:

Funeral Orgelpark
(This closing performance is the result of a week-long improvisation workshop. Direction Dance-Performance: Katie Duck)

Abandon Human
(A correspondence that revolves around a discussion between Performance artists Sharon Smith and Katie Duck. http://abandonhuman.com )

Traces of casualty

Cage make a movie
(Solo Katie / Music Mix Katie Duck)

Duck and Snaith (girls at work)
(Yolanda Snaith and Katie Duck / music mix Katie Duck)

Recent improvisation (OT301 Amsterdam / live musicians)

INTERVIEWS KATIE DUCK:

Katie Duck & Alfredo Genovesi at SDSU – closing talk

Katie Duck Interviewed by Marlon Barrios

Interview: Katie Duck & Alfredo Genovesi

Lecture of Katie Duck Workshop, San Francisco

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

WHO COULD ATTEND?
Katie can accept students from all performance art backgrounds and professional levels. Her only concern is that anyone who studies in her workshop have a deep interest in the work and is willing to experiment and take risks with the material she offers.

WHAT YOU LEARN?
Improvisational performance breaks the framework of preset choreography and challenges the artist to be the creator/composer/choreographer and the performer at the same time; to be the doer and the observer simultaneously. It is about learning ‘The Eye‘: of the space, of the watcher and essentially the eye of work being created.

The workshop is oriented towards building skills of performance presence, timing, tracking and conviction of choice/action. It focuses on developing skills to interpret dynamic space and creating one’s own performance frame. While Katie aims to explore novel and rigorous approaches to body work. The main focus lies in reaching a state of surprising oneself. The workshop will be structured into body work, activity-based sessions, performances and a jam.

Her warm-up and exercises emphasis how the eyes and the ears work in coordination with movement, sound and exposure to gathered crowds altering our perception of time, space, feelings and emotions. Improvisation sessions revolve around the terms pause, flow, exit, choice and presence with discussions articulating play, memory and intuition.

Katie guides the dancers and performers through physical exercises that highlight how the eyes and ears affect movement choices and developmental brain studies about “how we learned to walk”. She extends the workshop toward improvisation sessions by setting a fictional front in the studio space and then declaring this as a platform to choose pause, flow or exit. This platform highlights how the limit of these three choices can already provide the frame for a composition to take place, and that misunderstanding, coincidence, live time, interactivity, messiness, emotions, intuition and inspiration are basic materials in a creative process. These raw materials are integrated with the combined fact that everyone in the workshop group can make a choice.

WORKSHOP SETTING:
Choice is introduced to the workshop group as a compositional reality but also as a means for individuals to elect to participate in the performative or as a viewer and yet remain involved in the process. The aim is to gather the workshop group to recognize that in a creative composition process, time is passing at different perceived speeds and that space is shifting in several dimensions at once. This awareness creates a presence in the space and a compositional alertness.

Her aim is to provide a situation where artists can practice together and grow in confidence toward public performances with an objective to clarify that improvisation not the antitheses of choreography or composition but rather the way choreography and composition can be executed.

The improvisation sessions are given a delegated time frame with an option for the workshop group to shift, drop or lift the space at will. This shifting, dropping and lifting of the performance space places each individual in a position where they need to be to be fully awake or they will recognisably loose the thread of the creative compositional activity in play.

HOW KATIE TEACHS?
Katie has been teaching since she began to perform professionally in the mid 70’s. She is dedicated to how process and research play a major role in how one can continue to be artistic in how they approach their life and their work.

Over the past 10 years her workshops have been titled “Improvisation” in order to emphasis her views on theater as a live art form reflective of how she executes her own professional performances. Her research is placed in practice with lectures containing her recent interest in brain studies and film.

She integrates her current research making each workshop completely unique. She draws from her experiences in live performances, music collaborations, as a director and choreographer.

Her enthusiasm for a young artists to be able to continue their practice, in a very different atmosphere than when she began her work, is evident in how she has continued to up grade her life style with new technologies, continued to do research in the sciences, the performance arts and music. She has created several projects with an aim to support a young artists rather than her own career. She continues to take risks with her own career in the support of young artists giving them the possibility to experiment within their own practice.
She promotes to her students that the mental connection to the practice of improvisation can be accessed weather they are doing set or open framed performance pieces and that the definitions of what improvisation within art practices mean today need to be reflective to advances in brain-studies and technology.

In the way she communicates with students, one is aware of how she understands that the professional field of the arts has altered drastically in comparison to when she began her practice in the mid 70’s. As part of her teaching, she encourages young artists to devise strategies that allow for them to sustain the production of their work with creativity and research involved and yet survive.

RESEARCH MATERIAL:
Katie has had the possibility to create material for her workshops out of a wide range of practice in the performance arts. She has never formulated her teaching material into a frozen body of knowledge. She does not believe that the accumulation of knowledge is how one becomes a teacher. She believes that It is out of her practice and the practice she witnesses with a student that all knowledge becomes clarified in the lessons she leading.
http://katieduck.com/about-katie-duck/text/research-material/

QUOTES KATIE DUCK:
“The combination of moving, seeing, hearing, feeling and deliberately volunteering to expose myself in front of an audience alters my perception of time, space and emotions. What I do for a living is an induced neuron madness”

“I am not interested in the moment even though it does feel good. I am interested in movement and the fact that time is passing. It is a kind of hippie hype to encourage someone to be in the moment.”

“A fully awake body is rarely pedestrian. The body awake needs to be discovered and demands a discipline beyond everyday tasks. And yet when I see movement that does not respect the beauty of the body as pedestrian I become uncomfortable. How the body works and how I see a body is not so different an activity in how I feel. To not respect the body as an already perfect place of motion is like watching a dog trying to learn ballet.”

OTHER LINKS:
DR Sharon Smith essay about working with Katie Duck
http://www.sharonsmith.org/5-its-not-what-you-do-its-the-way-that-you-do-it.php

BIO KATIE DUCK:
Katie Duck is a director/performer/teacher who has been working professionally since 1976. She has dedicated her life to her work as an on going process rather than settle into one specific methodology or frame. She is working in the context of the time she is living in day to day. Her work is the voice for how she feels about that. Katie Duck is a feminist with an edge to move things along rather than look behind.

By the 1980’s, Katie began to take a microscopic study for the role improvisation plays in her real time composition integrating music, movement, object and writing. Improvisation in a Katie Duck performance is not the antithesis of choreography or composition; it is how she makes her art work out of practice both in the studio setting and the newness of real time improvised performance. Her performances are about the experience of being there, you are participating in the event and thus, in a sense, the work”. Katie Duck’s practice is a reflection of what she believes art in the theatre can only be; live.

She has developed a manifesto in how she conducts research, rehearsal processes, and workshops towards performances based on her background working with live musicians beginning in the mid 70’s and her obsession to write and then voice text in a mix with her musical background. Over the past 15 years, she has integrated her curiosity for developmental brain studies as a part of how she teaches movement research and how she works with live public. Public, in her performances, are witnesses and the main provider for how the piece is perceived.

Her performances are a practice of presence in a sound driven space with a flirtation to engage public so hopefully they remember what they have seen, heard and felt long after the live performance has died.

More at Katies Website: http://katieduck.com/about-katie-duck/bio/

LOCATION:
Tanzfabrik Berlin
Möckernstr.68, 10965 Berlin (Kreuzberg)
Studio No.4
http://www.tanzfabrik-berlin.de/en/studios

TRAFFIC LINKS:
U6 & 7 Yorckstrasse / Mehringdamm
S1 & 2 Yorckstrasse
Bus M19 Katzbachstrasse
https://www.google.de/maps?daddr=10965+Berlin,+M%C3%B6ckernstr.+68

PHOTO CREDIT:
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