participation Imre Vass in exerce workshop Ishmael Houston-Jones

In the frame of the Dance Hubs activity, Imre Vass (HU) was selected to participate in the exerce master workshop "Improvisation Strategies" by Ishmael Houston-Jones at ICI-CCN de Montpellier. 

Artist statement by Ishmael Houston-Jones

I have taught and performed many forms of Dance Improvisation for over 40 years. I have studied and used many improvisation strategies in my decades of dance practice among them: dancing naked on a Mediterranean beach to the sound of waves, disco clubbing, performed game structures, unstructured music and dance jamming, Contact Improvisation, improvisational theater exercises, releasing techniques, psycho and dance therapies, Authentic Movement, free writing and some imaginings that cannot be named. Improvisation by its nature is slippery and avoids being corralled into just one thing. And though improvisation resists the old (dance) school view of right and wrong, I do believe that there are worse and better ways of approaching the practice of improvisation to achieve desired results. 

Workshop description

What is your first impulse? Can you trust it? What happens when the judge falls asleep? Can sight be a handicap? Can you know too much? This is a workshop about Dancing and Speaking and Improvisation and Composition.
In this workshop we will use several improvisation strategies to open a free flow of immediate, spontaneous writing, speaking and dancing. We will employ different approaches of partnering, releasing, scores, texting, authentic movement and automatic writing to generate material. We will use the resultant dance and text to construct impromptu group pieces as well as a means toward broadening self-expression in solo work.

Bio
Ishmael Houston-Jones is choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographer Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora in the US and postmodernism and he co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, then and now.

As an author Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies and journals. His first book, FAT and other stories: some writing about sex, was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press. 

https://www.ishmaelhouston-jones.com