Workshop Katie Duck Improvisation for dancers and musicians
Eye - experience - Ear - read

Date: 14:00-18:00, November 7 to 10, 2006
Venue: Caochangdi Workstation
Fee of workshop: 100 RMB
Application of workshop: please send email with your application to us, and you will be accepted if we apply you. Email for contact: ccdworkstation@163.com;jampei@sohu.com
Call for information: 6433 6143?

About the workshop:
The content of this workshop is geared toward performing artists and musicians who are interested in amplifying live time in a performance space and practicing interdisciplinary art activities. Warm-up and exercises emphasis how the eyes, ears and mind work in co ordination with movement, sound in space and time. Improvisation sessions revolve around the terms Pause, Flow and Exit with discussions articulating body, play, memory and presence. The aim is to provide a situation where dancers and musicians can grow in confidence in how they perform live dancing and music while articulating composition concerns related to the performance setting without the use of pre set materials.

The eye experiences when aimed in the direction of space (infinite). When set to stare on captured movements done by elegant figures the brain begins to function quite differently...it reads. Body becomes object. This process of reading with the eye inhibits the ability for the ear to work .We do not use the ear to hear object. My aim is to provide a place for publics to access the full range of their senses and their feelings.

"Feelings of pain or pleasure, or some quality in between, are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the words and sentences that describe them use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies that only dies down when we are occupied by joy, or a mournful requiem when sorrow takes over"
..... Antonio Damasio?

Katie Duck’s Lecture
Date: 14:00, November 11, 2006
Venue: Caochangdi Workstation

Content：
The lecture will contain a brief outline of discoveries in new biology, neurology and quantum physics about: “the way we perceive the world via our senses through our feelings, the way we now understand the workings of the brain to body to brain and how this creates the place we define as mind.”
I will use a question-answer format with references from articles and books. I have listed books below (bibliography) which I will bring with me using short essays.
I would like to influence choreographic approaches with the students toward this fresh material both in how they communicate with dancers for developing work and in how we can now assume a public uses their senses when they see and hear danceI will focus on the use of the ear and the eye as the main preceptors in how we live in space and the theories of quantum physics about “how we perceive (or put together) matter out of what is actually only space”.

Bibliography – articles (internet search):
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio (Paperback - Oct 10, 2000)
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio (Paperback - Nov 1, 1995)
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio (Paperback - Dec 1, 2003)
The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Alexander Technique by Glynn MacDonald (Paperback - Nov 1998)
The history of schizophrenia (internet search) articles
Contemporary shamanism (internet search) articles
Quantum physics (internet search) articles

?I would like that the lecture space is set up in a casual matter so that the students available to ask questions. I will need a laptop (on-line) so that I can refer to internet searches and allow students to inter act with these searches.

Aim:
To give the students an area of research which is both intellectually and physically based.
To introduce students to contemporary views on subjects related to communications.
To allow for the students to inter act with the lecturer about the subjects involved so that they have research tools by the end of the lecture.
To help to clarify what happens when we set the body in time.
To clarify what I mean when I use the word improvisation in relationship to making? or dancing in performance.?

Bio Katie Duck
Katie Duck is a dancer, choreographer and teacher. From 1973-6 she toured with the company Salt Lake City Mime Troupe. She left the United States in 1976 to live in Amsterdam, Holland and toured throughout Europe as a performer in solo productions, in duet with Carlos Traffic, and in improvisations with the local music artists.

In 1979, she moved to Italy where she formed the company GROUPO, which toured through out Europe with the productions Ruttles, The Orange Man, Brown eye Green eye and Mind the gap. In 1986 she accepted a senior lecturer position at Dartington College of Arts teaching for the theatre department and led the choreography course. In 1991 she accepted a position at the AHK dance department in Amsterdam where she teaches composition, improvisation and technique.