Level: Dancers / Actors / Musicians / Performers

Ensemble Thinking (ET) is a method for operating in the complex environment of improvised performance. ET develops improvisational and perceptual choreographic skills that guide dance artists in ways that help to cultivate group awareness and to co-operatively compose in-the-moment through developing, recognizing, and responding to choreographic forms as they dynamically emerge in performance. In this workshop, we will start with examining the possibilities within the solo body, using precise scores to challenge our movement habits. These concepts will tune our awareness of our solo bodies, freeing our perceptions of how the solo operates in relation to the group. The principles of ET help the dancer focus on different elements of the moment: facing, level, movement, number, stillness, timing, space, focus, line, shape, etc. Heightened awareness of the relationship between the solo and the ensemble allows for greater facility and nuance in these elements as tools of creation and lenses of perception. This workshop is for dancers, actors, musicians, and CI dancers who are interested in increasing their kinetic awareness of the ensemble and solo in performance.

Andrew Wass has been creating and performing improvised performances 20 years. Performance and teaching opportunities have taken him to festivals, studios, and universities in Europe, Asia, and the United States. His performance work has been shown in San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Marfa, Tijuana, Berlin, Seattle, Tokyo, and New York. A graduate of the MA SODA program at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz Berlin, he is currently pursuing his PhD in Dance at Texas Woman’s University. A member of the Lower Left performance collective, his area of research is the confluence of philosophy, cognitive science, and improvised dance-making.