Contact Improvisation: The Gateway to Character and Movement Development

Practical workshop by Robbie Cook - Assistant Professor of Dance at Hofstra University in New York, USA. 

Robbie Cook is a Brooklyn-based dance artist working as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Hofstra University in New York, also teaching at American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival during the summer. He has taught through Japan Contemporary Dance Network as a member of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Sapporo, Japan; The i-Dance Festival in Hong Kong, Chadwick International School in Incheon, South Korea and twice set choreography on the students at Universidad de Las Américas in Puebla, México. He holds an MFA in Dance from Bennington College and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Robbie's website: https://robbiecookdance.weebly.com/ 

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW

The purpose of my workshop is to assimilate the improvisational structure of Contact Improvisation towards increasing the choices an actor or dancer can embody in the midst of their character development as part of any creative process.
The presentation overview will be for each person to connect with their body on the floor as a form of meditation, tuning into their senses of perception, releasing their weight into the floor and releasing tension in the body. They will then move on the floor with different tasks moving through body levels until everyone is standing and improvising through space.

The next phase is  partner work to explore the skills of moving together with a motivation behind the exploration being the development of movement generation and character development. The partners will then explore together, improvisational exercises that specifically address how they will use collaboration to create dynamic movement and develop characters that emerge from those explorations that will be performed at the end of the workshop.