LAURA HICKS (1979)
Is a Canadian performer, choreographer, and educator working in the realm of contemporary
dance. Inspired by a love of improvisation, movement patterning, and philosophy, her current research investigates states of the body as informed by relation; what we sense, changes how we experience ourselves, and the world around us. She has been supported as an independent artist by the Canadian Council for the Arts since 2007, and her work has been presented across Canada and in Germany. She received The Holy Body Tattoo Award as BC’s Most Promising Emerging Artist in 2009, and worked with EDAM Dance, The Holy Body
Tattoo, DanStaBat, Restless Productions, and Machinenoisey in Vancouver, Canada, as well as the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and Random Scream/Davis Freeman in the US and Europe.
Practicing Contact Improvisation since 2004, she is influenced by the teachings of Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, Andrew Hardwood, and Chris Aiken, and most particularly by Peter Bingham whom she studied with from 2005 – 2011 in Vancouver,Canada.
Laura now lives in Frankfurt, holds an MA in Contemporary Dance Education and is a fully certified instructor of the Pilates method.
Yield, Push, Reach and Pull
According to Bartenieff Fundamentals, yield before push, and reach before pull are the basic elementsof developmental movement patterns.
We can use these patterns to explore movement in both a ‘Somatic’ and a creative way. We will warm up and explore, asking questions in movement while also changing out state. We will break movement down into pieces and then play with it and see what happens when we come into contact.
