Laura Hicks

Contemporary for Dancers

02.+03.03.2024, 13:00–14:30
04.03. – 08.03.2024, 12:00–13:30

Training for Dancers

Bio

Laura Hicks (*Toronto 1979) is a choreographer and educator based in Frankfurt am Main. Her work is inspired by sensory states, qualities and intensities explored through improvisation. Drawing from the contradictoriness and aliveness inherent in bodily experience, her works are often marked by an intense physicality and comic moments. In Hicks&Bühler’s, ”Der Klumpen” was selected for the HTT19 and “Strange Loops” was a co-production with Mousonturm and the Hessisches Staatsballett as part of the Tanzplattform Rhein-Main.“Making Impressions and Other Failures” (Hicks and Reynolds 2018) was also selected for HTT2021 and toured in Germany and internationally. In 2022 she produced two new works (‘Dritter Raum’ and ‘Gut Symmetries’). She has also worked with Schauspiel Frankfurt, LIGNA, Glokowski/Hoesch, FLUX e.V (Mannheim) as dramaturg, Davis Freeman/Random Scream and Kovács/O’Doherty among others. She holds an MA in Contemporary Dance Education (HfMDK 2015), is the curator for Profitraining at Tanzplattform Rhein-Main/ Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, and is adjunct faculty for the BA Tanz and MA CoDE programs at the Frankfurt University of Music and performing arts (HfMDK).

Kursbeschreibung

The Kinesthetic Body
How do we with our kinesthetic sense? Laura has been building her approach to working with what she calls the ‘kinesthetic state’ in building solo movement qualities for the last seven years. Training full body articulation, we work with awareness mapping through sensory expansion in specific directions of movement. We challenge our agility and reflexes by layering qualities of falling, moving off axis, spiraling and momentum. We will work with speed and duration, looking at how we compose time as solo movers. These classes are geared towards the professional dancer who is interested in training an articulate solo body and deeper understanding of specificity and technique when wanting to take risks with falling through space. Designed to ready the professional dancer for the day, will get sweaty, while cultivating a sense of aliveness in our bodies.