April 16-18, 2015
Internationally renowned dancer and leading figure in Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith will be in residence at the Ohio State University Department of Dance April 16-18 as part of a collaboration with Norah Zuniga Shaw, Associate Professor of Dance. The residency will include a series of workshops for OSU students as well as a full-day workshop in embodied research that is open to the public drawing on Stark Smith and Zuniga Shaw’s collective experience.
Thursday, April 16
Collaborative Research with Norah Zuniga Shaw at ACCAD
Friday, April 17
Contact Improvisation Class (for current Dance Majors and Grads, limited to 25 participants)
10:20am - 2:40pm, Studio 390, Sullivant Hall
Register for this class here.
Saturday, April 18
Dance Improvisation Workshop - Embodied Research: The Trace is Not the End
10:00am - 5:00pm, Studio 390, Sullivant Hall
$55 (Participation Fee) - Register here.
$15 (OSU students) - Register here.
This workshop for experienced improvisers brings participants into an experience of embodied research that integrates analytical and creative processes of scoring. Participants will work together to discover how a full range of ideas and questions contained within dance can be moved, traced, transmitted, communicated, and used to catalyze new creative activity in dance and beyond. The workshop will include movement, observation, writing, drawing, and discussion in a cycle that always returns to the body in motion. A range of interdisciplinary creative methods and movement practices, including some contact improvisation, will be used.
The residency is part of the Department of Dance’s exploration of embodied practice as research and the role of technology in communicating dance knowledge, inspired by Zuniga Shaw’s research questions and leadership in Dance and at ACCAD. Stark Smith’s residency follows the launch of Zuniga Shaw’s most recent work focusing on dance improvisation, a collaboration with animator Maria Palazzi for Motion Bank entitled TWO: Dancing Mind Thinking Body (http://scores.motionbank.org/two/)
Nancy Stark Smith danced in the first performances of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton and others in 1972 in NYC and has since been central to its development as dancer, teacher, performer, writer/publisher, and organizer. She travels worldwide teaching and performing with many favorite partners and performance makers including Ray Chung, Karen Nelson, Andrew Harwood, Julyen Hamilton, and musician Mike Vargas. In 1975, she cofounded Contact Quarterly dance journal, which she continues to co-edit and publish. Her first book, Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas, was released in 2008.
Norah Zuniga Shaw is best known for her large-scale interactive media collaborations with animator Maria Palazzi and choreographers William Forsythe, Bebe Miller, and Thomas Hauert. Her collaborative screen-based work, Synchronous Objects (2009), visualizes deep structures in Forsythe’s work and has toured internationally and has received numerous honors and awards as well as millions of online visitors. Her most recentonline work, TWO (2013), was commissioned by Motion Bank and focuses on memory, habit, and impulse in improvisation. Shaw presents frequently on her work and since 2004 has been director for dance and technology at The Ohio State University.
Photo Credits:
Photos 1-3: Dancers Nancy Stark Smith and Yeong Wen Lee; Photo by Ku and Dancers
Photo 4: Dancer Nancy Stark Smith: Photo by Patrick Beelaert
Photo 5: Dancers Nancy Stark Smith and Charlie Morrissey; Photo by Ilya Domanov
Photo 6: Still from annotated video illustrating the complex system of cueing in One Flat Thing, reproduced. Credit: Synchronous Objects Project, The Ohio State University and The Forsythe Company