Omeo Dance

Solo Practice Workshops

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Creative practice intensives with Rosalind Crisp (AU), facilitating dance artists towards developing their own movement-making tools.

Drawing on principles and practical tools from her own dance-making methodology, Rosalind will propose structures to ‘do it yourself’. Structures that accommodate the bodily condition one finds oneself in, and the flesh, breath, weight, edges or contents of the body, as primary material for dancing. Ways to guide sensation into dancing by bringing it into relationship with compositional tools and imaginative/fictive frameworks.

Rosalind’s work supports dance artists to develop an embodied practice, guide themselves as independent creative agents and take pleasure in the challenges of working alone.

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Background methodology

Rosalind Crisp's dance methodology could be called choreographic improvisation. It is a dynamic set of principles and practical tools that dancers can use to pay attention to the act of dancing - making dance in real-time, with and from the materiality of their own bodies.

The body is 'prepared' with a focus on breath, weight and sensation. Held tension and schematic patterns are undone and attention is brought to the materiality of the body itself. Compositional choices (textures, tones, images, body parts... ) and choreographic improvisation tools and parameters guide the dancer, for example, initiating from one surface of the body at a time. Awareness includes the whole body and is simultaneously localised, enabling the dancer to initiate from any part of the body at any time – parts that may be anatomically divided or fictitiously separated. Processes like flow, delay and rupture also assist the dancer to detach from presenting 'moves' and focus her attention on the continual emergence of, and shaping of the dance, in a shared and porous relationship with her audience.

Crisp's practice undoes the hegemony of movement patterns inscribed in dancers' bodies. She skills dancers to understand the presence of these histories in their bodies and how to continually renegotiate them in the dancing. Her tools are constantly evolving, constituting a rigorous and recognisable model for artistic self-learning. Her workshops offer processes by which dancers may guide themselves as independent creative agents.

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Advanced Research Labs

In her Advanced Labs Rosalind Crisp shares deeper concerns, processes & questions arising from her artistic practice. She works with the body as a generative and intra-subjective environment in perpetual dialogue with its own choreographer, and deals with the possibility of art revealing processes instead of static entities.

Examples of areas explored in Advanced Labs are:
undoing dance from the hegemony of history  /  attention flow, lag & rupture  /  embodied imagination & the undomesticated body  /  plunging into the vast vat of bodily materials  /  picking over the rubble of dance's failed obsession with movements - through dancing  /  material body meets fictional body  /  why dancers move so much and other troubles with dance…

For over thirty years Rosalind Crisp has been dancing with and from the materiality of her body - the heavy weights that are continually present (gravity, flesh, breath, contents...) and the ephemerals (attention, imagination, and how things are constantly changing).

Her Advanced Labs offer dancers and dancer/choreographers who are familiar with her choreographic improvisation method, the artistic support for sustaining a long-term practice as an artist.