Wednesday 14 October 2009

Wed 15.10.09 23.51pm

I attended Amici wokshop this evening at the Lyric in Hammersmith with a few of the students from DIC. Amici is a Dance Theatre Company that works with disabled and able bodied performers. It was a drop in session tonight where anyone could turn up (you usually have to be a member to participate) and when they were only expecting 20 people there were over 50 dancers tonight. The 2 hours was focused around improvising in small groups and bigger groups. One dance I particularly enjoyed was with a blind woman aged around 60. She was one of the happiest people I have ever improvised with; I say this as when she first finds your touch her face lights up as you can clearly see how much she enjoys the intimacy. At one point I closed my eyes too and we were just responding to each others touch and working from impulse. This dance was slower than with others as you had to listen to each others movements. After a while we even explored giving and recieving weight but it all finished too quickly. The whole evening is based around chance...anyone can be chosen and anyone can shout out the number of people dancing next or which song number to dance to.

There was another performer that was really inspiring. It was a girl of around 20 with Down Syndrome. She was a fantastic dancer as she was so sensitve to the others. She did a trio with a boy in a wheelchair and Christine (blind lady) and I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was making eye contact so nicely between the two and created such a vivid story that we all related to.

We found out that Tina is working on their next show with them in June. There is a long waiting list to join the company so Wolfgang (the director) said we could pop in and out ocasionally to join in seeing as we know Tina ;). I would love to carry on visiting this company and dancing with them.

Zx

3 comments:

  1. Fantastic Zoe. I'm really pleased you had such a great time. We have another link with Allie, who works as a producer for the company and has already asked for some students to support the February show in the Lyric.

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  2. Fantastic. This sounds great. Would love to get involved for sure. They said we could pop along every now and again to watch their development for the show, and I will chat to Tina to see if she would like any of us involved on the design side. Thanks Mark

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  3. I would love to work with Amici too. Maybe we could have a chat about it sometime?

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