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Teaching
Greenberg is an internationally
sought after teacher, on the faculty of the Conservatory of
Dance at Purchase College since 1987. He conducts classes in
technique, improvisation, choreography and repertory.
When presenting information or suggesting areas for investigation,
Greenberg employs a “possibilities-in-the-field”
approach, with the understanding that dance and the body are
arenas of contested meanings, with no absolutes on which to
rely. He encourages participants to try ideas on for size, while
retaining the ability to choose what is best for themselves.
His teaching is influenced by his work with Janet Panetta (ballet),
Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler (Klein Technique), June Ekman
(Alexander Technique) and RoseAnne Spradlin (Body-Mind Centering),
and by his studies on teaching and learning with Alan Mandell
at Empire State College.
Greenberg has served as artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence
College, University of Minnesota, George Washington University
and Teatro alla Scala in Milan and has conducted workshops at
Greenwich Dance Agency and Chisenhale Dance Space in London,
the International Summer School of Dance in Tokyo, Danscentrum
in Stockholm, and in Budapest and Taiwan under the auspices
of Dance Theater Workshop’s Suitcase Fund. He facilitated
the Bessie Schönberg Laboratory in Composition at DTW in
2003 and conducts annual composition workshops through Movement
Research in New York.
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Dance-Making (Composition)
A workshop for choreographers and others interested in dance-making
processes, with the goal of clarifying, distilling, and amplifying
each artist’s individual voice. Participants are asked
to develop palettes of movement and movement ideas via directed
improvisation, then to experiment to find strategies of organization
so the material possesses the greatest potency to the dance-maker.
Points of departure for investigation and class discussion include:
How the audience builds a theory while watching a dance, what
constitutes dance-events in each artist’s work, how events
are framed within a dance, issues of consonance and dissonance,
and participation or non-participation in existing traditions.
Greenberg also opens his own choreographic process for study,
revealing varied influences such as his inceptive aesthetic
education with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, somatic techniques
as movement liberators, and approaches of discontinuity from
experimental theater and film.
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Improvisation
Greenberg asks participants to consider and collaborate with
as much of “what is” as possible—the body,
time, space, sound, other dancers—in the creation of considered
and specific dance moments.
He utilizes concepts drawn from his study of somatic techniques—such
as Klein Technique, Alexander Technique and Body-Mind Centering—as
points of departure for directed improvisation and open investigation.
Participants are given time to experiment with the physical
and theoretical information, and to explore the continuums of
leading/following, articulation/connection and conscious/unconscious.
Goals include fully individualized and idiosyncratic dancing,
and an increased ability to make instantaneous choreographic
decisions.
Improvisation is put forward as an arena for discourse, and
an opportunity for the examination of the aesthetic values and
assumptions behind improvisational decisions, preferences, and
habits.
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Technique
A warm-up drawing largely from Greenberg’s study of somatic
approaches, such as Klein Technique, is followed by an application
of these concepts to both familiar and unfamiliar movements,
including sequences from his choreography.
A primary focus of Greenberg’s use of somatic approaches
is to help the dancer find a connection to the floor from which
he or she can stretch and move out into space. Attention is
given to sharpening the dancer's awareness of time and energy,
educating the body to move with specificity, and augmenting
the dancer's range of qualitative possibilites.
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Repertory
and Performance
Greenberg works with the participants as he works with dancers
of his company, developing new movement with them and/or teaching
them movement from his existing choreography.
Dance materials are developed with the help of video techniques—learning
movement “verbatim” that Greenberg has improvised
for the camera. This process involves gathering information
from a source external to the body, a two-dimensional video
image, and translating this to a three-dimensional, real and
idiosyncratic physicality. Work is then begun structuring the
material into choreographic sequences through which the dancers
can experiment with performance skills.
As points-of-departure toward investing the movement with varying
performance possibilities, Greenberg presents information and
exercises from somatic approaches that influence the movement,
as well as methods of presentation from experimental theater
and film that influence the performance style.
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| ph/fx - 212-982-1150 | 67 East 2nd Street #39 New York, NY 10003-9218
| info@neilgreenberg.org
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©
2004 Neil Greenberg (All Rights Reserved) |
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