Louise Michel Jackson
Photo © Lara Oudjian
Workshop - Feline mobility and coral vibrations : Athletic games and somatic explorations across the scale
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The first part of this workshop will offer intense “athletic" physical training combining playful games, physical tasks and improvisation exercises. The work will focus on cardio, muscle strengthening, floor work, and quadrupedal movements, while engaging the power and motor function of the shoulder girdle, the deep abdominals and the pelvic floor. We will also explore the efficiency and fluidity of inversions and pathways between sky and earth through small acrobatics and hand balances. Powerful movements combined with an awareness of the center and an accumulation of energy in space — centrifugal force !
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In the second part we will harness the fatigue previously generated in the body and devote it to various somatic sensory experiences, both individually and collectively. We will explore notions of presence, state, empathy, perception, and the threshold of active listening to both oneself and to others. Expect rocking, undulations, vibrations, fragmented and repetitive movements and isolation exercises. We will work with tasks and textures (speed, muscle density, amplitude, etc.) in different parts of the body to complexify and divert predictable pathways. We will playfully explore a personal language which will draw on everyday experience, our imagination and learned and codified movement patterns. We will try to deconstruct our habits and tendencies to transcribe and share our sensations more intimately and uniquely.
I imagine this week as a big playground, between micro-cellular and highly acrobatic/athletic body trajectories to generate energy together. Taking risks with trust, bringing out textures, animating edges, activating contrasts, broadening everyone's creative potential through physical, sensory and cerebral situations and stimulations. I like to facilitate a human experience that relies on the commitment of each person and the energy deployed by the support of the community. Like a big, sober party with a fiery playlist to indulge yourself in, to push your limits, to breathe deeply, to listen to your own deep and luminous laughter in darkness of a current global climate which oppresses our hearts and our bodies. Let’s act and feel together to bring out the forces of the living and the sensitive, from the simplest to the most complex, and indeed as close as possible to oneself.
Louise Michel Jackson
Workshop
June 3 to 7
9:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m.
(17.5 hours)
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Wilder Building
Studio: to be confirmed
Pricing and
Registration
DAC pro - $ 175 ($10 / hr)
Standard- $ 280 ($16 / hr)
*This workshop may be partially reimbursed through the RQD Dancer Training Support Program . Please verify directly with the RQD.
Louise Michel Jackson​
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Louise Michel is a choreographer, performer and teacher. For more than 20 years, she has worked for different companies and independent artists such as Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Rubberbandance, Sasha Kleinplatz, Dana Gingras, Frédérick Gravel, Alan Lake, Jacques Poulin-Denis, Adam Kinner, Simon Portigal, Lara Oundjian and Eastman-Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. After living 5 years in Belgium, she sailed between Brussels and Montreal, creating her first project "STROKE" aka SHUDDER in collaboration with Ben Fury (Belgium). She then created a first solo Bright Worms (Théâtre Lachapelle April 2021 and Offta 2023), research on bioluminescence with integration of video projection and light devices in collaboration with sound artist Magali Babin. She is interested in low-fi augmented reality in a multi-disciplinary DIY practice which remains far from high-tech practices and which favors sensory experience and the intimate influence of humans. Her choreographic universe is dreamlike and fantasized through vibrant color filters and live manipulations. She constructs multi-layered spaces where textures, materials, reflections create a microcosm that is both strange and welcoming.
On her transmission practice :
It was by guiding Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui repertoire workshops that she began teaching in Europe in 2012. She has since drawn inspiration from a multitude of influences (teachers, choreographers and collaborators - extraordinary humans) from Europe and here who have shaped his educational and creative approach to transmission. She likes to imagine it as a great sharing of material, information, useful, expansive and malleable tools anchored in experience of the stage and studio training. It encourages intuitive momentum, drawn from vital energy and the anatomical limitations specific to each body. Far from form, it favors the practical and efficient motor function of the structural organization of a movement. She shares improvisation structures that offer technical tools and compositional strategies to facilitate full awareness, autonomy and self-confidence through choices inhabited by an intention, an assumed task and a deep feeling. It encourages horizontality, where individual and collective pleasure, power, fragility, curiosity, kindness, rigor, and critical analysis (constructive and uninhibited) come together in the same space. She teaching regularly at UQAM, EDCM, Big Bang and DAC. Since 2021, she has worked in the field of plants and flowers at the Jean-Talon market. Hands in the earth and “out of the dance circuit”, this fascinating sphere now proves essential for maintaining good mental balance and maintaining the space of perspective necessary for one's artistic practice.