KickStart Toronto
WORKSHOPS
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Who Needs A Dramaturg?
Workshop on Dance Dramaturgy and Creative Process, for choreographers and their artistic collaborators
By: Guy Cools, Dance Dramaturg
Winchester Street Theatre
80 Winchester St
Fri May 12, 2023 from 9am - 12pm (Studio A)
& Sat May 13, 2023 from 9am - 12pm (Studio C)
In Partnership with Toronto Dance Theatre
The underlying idea of this workshop is that as a choreographer you don’t necessarily need a dramaturg, but you should instead develop your own dramaturgical reflection on your artistic practice.
This workshop will offer participants practical tools and exercises to reflect upon, to evaluate and eventually to transform their creative process.Using the cross, circle and labyrinth as graphic symbols, we will discuss the essential polarities of the creative process: perception, formation, intuition, experience. Through practical and physical exercises we will explore how dramaturgy/the dramaturg can contribute to this process as witness, dialogue partner and ‘editor’.
The final goal of this workshop is to gain a different, renewed perspective of one’s own creative and choreographic process and methodologies through discovering the diversity of practices of the other participants.
"The generosity and openness of Guy Cools made this workshop even more rich and informative: we were thinking together"
- Previous Participant
Guy Cools is a Belgian dance dramaturg. He worked amongst others with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE),
Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Christopher House (CAN), Akram Khan (UK), Andrea Nann (CAN) (www.guycools.com). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice Rewriting Distance (www.rewritingdistance.com). His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). From December 2022, he is full time professor in the dance department of UQAM, Montréal.
Photo of Guy Cools by Pawel Wyszomirski
Dance and the Aspects of Light
Workshop on Exploring Techniques of Lighting for Dance
By: Jareth Li
York University Light Lab
CFT 153
85 York Blvd
322 Centre for Film and Theatre
Sat May 13, 2023 from 1pm - 4pm
Participants will have an opportunity to explore the techniques of lighting, and how they are employed in creating a lighting design for dance.
This workshop will take place in a studio, with a lighting plot to work with. There will be a discussion on the various aspects of light, and explore how dancers and choreographers can create a shared language with their designers.
This will be followed by some hands on work with lighting equipment and the creation of some lighting looks on a lighting board, to allow participants to gain an understanding of what a designer is looking at on the stage in the process of building a show.
Born in Singapore, Jareth Li is a stage designer based in Toronto by way of Calgary. He has a love for new work that examines identity politics, culture, and heritage.
Select Credits include: Prince Caspian (Shaw Festival); Jersey Boys, Ring of Fire (Citadel Theatre); Controlled Damage (Grand Theatre); Every Little Nookie (Stratford Festival); Peter’s Final Flight (Ross Petty Productions); The Hours That Remain (Theatre Aquarius), Three Women of Swatow (Tarragon Theatre), The Home Project, The Wolves, Casimir and Caroline, Punk Rock, (The Howland Company);
Jareth is a member of IATSE 659 – The Associated Designers of Canada, and an instructor in York University’s Theatre Department.