CONTEMPORARY SYSTEMS AN INTERIOR & MATERIAL APPROACH TO MOVEMENT© Workshop Description Sidra Bell has crafted a unique and comprehensive approach and system to unlocking the creative potential in each artist by developing movement that evolves from the inside out, both physically and intellectually. The workshop explores a highly articulate body emphasizing organization, description, effort, risk, clarity, observation, abandon, impulse, breath, gesture, weight, touch, space, sound, direction, and line. Touch, therapy, psychology, state of mind, and awareness are cornerstones of the workshop. Artists of various backgrounds and experience can discover their individual voice and a deeper physical understanding. Investigative tactics and improvisatory explorations are used to instigate an artist's imagination and intellect to find a greater sense of freedom within the movement vocabulary. Throughout the workshop the phrase work from Sidra Bell Dance New York is introduced and then immediately destroyed, dissected, and deconstructed. These frameworks challenge the dancers to investigate an extreme sense of physicality, specificity, complexity, and task opening the mind to possibility. The workshop utilizes collective effort in group improvisations, conversational task work, dialogue, play, and creative process explorations. The phrase work is lush, gestural, dynamic, powerful, and pulsating leaving the dancers with a feeling of exhaustion and exhilaration. The artists are pushed to remain in a constant state of choice and to work with deliberate action. Bell’s work emphasizes a high degree of physicality and input from the dancers, encouraging them to execute movement with intention, play, curiosity, calm, empathy, ease, and focus.
CULTIVATION OF the conscious, critical, and present mind through art making© MASTER TEACHING AND GUEST LECTURING Bell is a sought after master teacher and has taught her unique approach to creative process, improvisation, repertory, and technique at many prestigious institutions for dance and theater. She is currently refining and cataloguing her approach in a comprehensive study of movement entitled Contemporary Systems- An Interior & Material Approach to Movement. She has also been a special guest lecturer introducing her artistic philosophy- Developing the Conscious, Critical, and Present Mind through Art Making. She has been on faculty at Stella Adler Studio of Acting in the Movement Department as well as the Physical Theater Intensive and was also an artist in The Harold Clurman Center for New Work in Movement and Dance Theater (M.A.D.). Other guest teaching includes an adjunct professor position at Barnard College (Columbia University), The Movement Invention Project NYC, The Joffrey Ballet School Jazz & Contemporary Program, Peridance Capezio Center, Project Launch (San Francisco and Long Beach), Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet School, Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts, Canadian Children’s Dance Theatre (Toronto), Arts Umbrella (Vancouver), Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, Marygrove College (Detroit), University of Michigan, New Jersey Dance Theatre, Cleo Parker Robinson (Colorado), Ballet Divertimento (Montréal), San Jose State, Perry Mansfield (Colorado), New Haven Ballet, Greenwich Academy, LaGuardia High School, Elisa Monte Dance Choreography Workshop, Balance Dance Company (Idaho), Long Island University, young ARTS Miami (NFAA), Hunter College, Ailey II, BLUEPRINT with Drew Jacoby of Jacoby & Pronk, and The Ailey School.
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READ FEATURE ARTICLE IN JUNE 2012
DANCE TEACHER MAGAZINE.
"Watching Bell's work is like entering a mysterious couture circus. Her strikingly costumed dancers isolate body parts like puppets within her highly designed movement. But what appears complex actually stems from clarity. 'Simple movement really shows who a dancer is and allows it to speak to many different kinds of people.' says Bell who sets work on college and high school dancers across the U.S. as artistic director of Sidra Bell Dance New York."- Schwab