Hugh Stanier

Contemporary Training for Dancers

22.11. + 23.11.2025, 13:00–14:30
29.11. + 30.11.2025, 13:00–14:30

Bio

Hugh is a Dance Artist & Movement educator specialized in Floor Work & Contact Improvisation. He has over 20 years of teaching & performance experience. He began dancing when he was 15, training in Break Dance and Contemporary. He went on to train at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, graduating in 2008. Since then he has worked with companies such as 2Faced Dance, Tom Dale, STAN Won’t Dance, and Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez.
He has taught internationally at the Goa Contact Festival, Goa Dance residency, Thailand Contact and ecstatic arts festival, Berlin Contact Festival and Portugal Contact Festival and for National Dance company Wales (NDCW) as well as organizing his own workshops and retreats in Portugal, Germany and Israel. Within his teaching practice he combines his experience in Break Dance, Contemporary and Contact Improvisation to create a highly physical, technical and intuitive approach to movement exploration.
He is a TMW (Tai Chi Movements for Wellbeing) facilitator. The principles of Tai Chi and Qi Kung underpin his approach to teaching and sharing movement. Guided by the ethos of presence and play, Hugh’s work emphasizes listening to the body’s innate wisdom and exploring movement that feels organic and authentic. His sessions offer a gentle yet powerful space to reconnect with breath, awareness, and the freedom of self-expression, encouraging participants to find their own sense of joy, balance, and ease in movement.

Class Description

Riding Momentum
Floor-work and improvisation

The focus of these classes is a combination of floor based, technical movement sequences and Improvisation.
Beginning from a soft, slow, somatic place and gradually building towards moving dynamically on the floor & from ground to standing and back again through spiral pathways.
Using momentum and suspension to feel lightness and find a feeling of flow through the sequences.

Then the focus will shift into improvisational play and experimentation with the techniques offered in the sequences.

My approach has been developed from my own experience of training the body throughout my career over the last 20 years, with the predominant focus towards finding efficiency and economy in movementment. Drawing on Somatic practices, developmental movement patterns, Floor-work and breakdance techniques, and working with a combination of choreographed exercises & improvisation. Allowing the dancing body to deepen its own innate intelligence. This helps greatly with expanding creative enjoyment of moving and also with building strength, stamina and resilience. Additionally, I find this approach helps with injury prevention and finding a deeper source of creativity.

The principle aims of the training:

–> To cultivate awareness and intelligence in the body/mind.
–> To provide tools to support you in further developing your own movement vocabulary.
–> Softly & deeply warming the body from the core to the extremities with a focus on nourishing yourself and finding greater joy and freedom in movement
–> Developing an inquisitive and resilient mind and body.