top of page
wakefulness in a tiring time
ACROSS OCEANS ARTS: PROJECTS

Wakefulness in a Tiring Time

Kinitiras Studio residencies • Athens • August – September 2015, 2016

Across Oceans Arts - Wakefulness In A Tiring Time

Preparation: Go to the sea, Swim. Pay attention to the water’s support of your body and the air that falls in and out of you as breath. Swim in the water and when out of the water. And once out of the water stay wonderfully awake.

“Yes go to the sea. Swim and feel the water velvet on all parts of your body and muscles and bones and know how the breath is inside you. Swim in the water and when out of the water. And when out of the water don’t sleep. This world is full of soporifics. You need to be wonderfully awake. When you want to sleep Breathe instead, consciously, take the air in, let it sit inside and then send it back out into the world. Don’t be still. Keep moving. There is always movement even when unseen. Breathe consciously and keep your eyes open, look at everything in its utmost detail and then try to see the details as an undeniable Whole. Breathe and keep your eyes open and sing, sing anything, beautifully or badly, quietly so only you feel the song (but audible) or with others. Breathe, see, sing and read, out loud, and listen to natural things, surely, and also human-made things (objects and rhetoric) still breathing and seeing and hearing and singing, in and out.

This is how we move, make sound, speak, how we might understand.”

Maxine Heppner

THE RESIDENCY
 

There are times when I know that by moving backward I move forward, and this is a time.

 

Recently my practice and creation begins with breath, heightens awareness, notices patterns of energy, and weaves complex movement schemas into strings of contiguous poetic action.
 

Today I am remembering phrases said at different times by different people that at the time changed my world.

So I have decided to pay attention. If I attend to each one, and then to all of them, what will happen?

 

“start” (Elsie Salomons)
“there is no such thing as turning” (Thil Tiel)
“take away opposition” (Paula Ravitz)
“it is all in the details” (Ruth Zaporah)
“the whole is (very) simple” (Sir Isaac Newton)

The Commitment: We will start each day dancing the directions. Together Atalanti Mouzouri, Mariela Nestora, Teti Nikolopoulou, Eva Papadopoulos, Katerina Tzigotzidou, Maxine Heppner. We will identify the details, remove opposition and never turn around. And loudly or silently, we will breath as we do when swimming in the sea.

THE WORKSHOP

is rigorous, appropriate for movers and sounders from dance and theatre, each working with your own experience at your own pace. Please wear comfortable clothing and bring a few steps of a dance, a bit of a song and/or a short statement/text.

Maxine Heppner’s movement-voice practice is an alternate approach that allows powerful muscular work needed for vigorous physical performance while opening internal pathways of ease for sound to resonate freely through the body.

We begin with the premise that moving and voicing are indivisible and physical. We begin with impulse. Impulse sets energy in motion. Motion takes shape, direction, space. Structures develop. Exercises awaken awareness, circulation, isolation and coordination of the moving sounding body. Internal and external impulse, energy and articulation are explored through guided individual practice, then applied to combinations, independent explorations and with witnesses, so participants begin to make the work personally relevant.


at Kinitiras Studio – Artistic Residency Centre
www.kinitirastudio.com
Facebook page: Kinitiras-Studio

Maxine Heppner returned to Kinitiras in August-Sept 2015 and 2016 to share her integrated movement-voice technique and her energy work with movers and sounders from all genres of performance. Choreographer, director, performer and teacher of contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, Maxine is guest artist for festivals, companies, and academies in North America, Southeast Asia, Australia and Europe. She has been honored by many awards and commissions in her 40-year career. She is invited worldwide as mentor and guest artist to teach contemporary dance, her integrated movement-voice technique, and her creation practice “cycles”, based on neurological patterning and energy impulse. Her writings about creation, artistic process and collaboration have been published in journals and many international conferences. In Canada she founded the dance department of the first high school for performing arts and has been faculty and ongoing guest at Universities of Toronto, York and Concordia and arts institutions and professional companies worldwide. In Athens she has taught and coached for Eniamorpho, Yelp!, Studio Metzis, Chorochoros, The Duncan Centre for Dance Research, Quasitellar, Rallou Manou, Kinitiras and the Athenaeum music conservatory.

bottom of page