Artist Encounters is an online professional development workshop with a guest artist, focusing on cultivating practical skills, sharing knowledge and asking questions that resonate.
For Dance Umbrella Festival 2023, we are joined by critically acclaimed international choreographer Abby Zbikowski, who focuses on how to create rehearsal spaces that reclaim the brutal rigor that goes into the practice of hyperphysical movement. Through the subversion of outdated hierarchies, Abby demonstrates how practice can be used as a vehicle for individual and collective growth.
In this interactive session, Abby offers insight on how to build and sustain relationships with dancers when asking them to repeatedly do the impossible. She shares how her experience with athletics, punk and African Diasporic dance have mentally, physically and politically informed her approach. And she divulges her most successful and unsuccessful coaching moments, revealing what they have taught her about her responsibility as a dance maker.
Participants are led through exercises to discover the ways in which, through a system of interconnected relationships between dancers, choreographers, physical movement and a greater purpose that emerges throughout a process, layers of meaning are made.
About the artist +
Abby Zbikowski is a choreographer creating contemporary dance works that pay homage to the effort of living, tactics of survival, and the aesthetics produced as a result, utilising the physical aspects and psyche-emotional experience of her rigorous training in African and Afro-diasporic forms, playing sports, and performing manual labour.
She founded Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 and received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.”
In 2018 she received a Choreographer of the Future commission from Dance Umbrella and in 2020 a United States Artists Fellowship. She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, currently artist-in-residence at New York LiveArts, and formerly at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, formerly at the University of Illinois and on faculty at the American Dance Festival.
She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; at Festival Un Pas Vers L’Avant in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and studied at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal. Abby has created commissioned work for the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and numerous universities.
FAQs +
How can I attend the discussion?
Advanced registration is required to join the discussion, please fill in the sign-up form above to attend for free.
I’ve already registered for the event – how can I attend the workshop?
Please look out for an email from Dance Umbrella on the day of the workshop with the event details and instructions on how to join.
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This is sent on the day of the event. Check your junk folder and if you have not received it by 1 hour before the event start time, please contact [email protected].
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For queries about your booking please email [email protected]
Access +
Captioned
No audio description available.
Language: English
Online professional development workshop recorded from a live Zoom webinar recording.
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