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Festival Bios

FALL Festival 2008 Thanks to everyone who attended this year's fall festival. It was an incredible experience for all of us! MOVEMENT RESEARCH FALL FESTIVAL 2008: Sidewinder December 1 - 13, 2008 Movement Research, one of the world's leading laboratories for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, returns to Danspace Project with its annual Fall Festival. The Fall Festival focuses on improvisation and features acclaimed experimentalists highlighting and juxtaposing their varied investigations into the artistic currents of the form. In addition to the performances at Danspace Project, the Fall Festival will feature classes and workshops taught by Festival participants December 1st – 13th. CURATORIAL STATEMENT A fascination with how the field of dance and music improvisation is developing through generations and across continents fueled the curation of this festival. We hope to foster a cross generational, cross cultural process that is playful and cultivates a conversation about the field, where it has been and where it is headed through game playing, score creating, performing, teaching and community discussion. Improvisation is a resilient form based on the ability to respond to constantly changing circumstances and events. It involves working with the material at hand and imagining as well as allowing the next course of action to happen. This may seem at odds with playing a game that has a direct outcome and goal but the strategies and tactics inherent in game playing are tools of improvisation and involve relating, responding and planning with spatial and conceptual thinking. For years, Steve Paxton has developed a daily Chinese checkers practice with his neighbor in Vermont. To keep their strategies alive and spontaneous, they rearrange the pattern of the board for every game. These tactics reflect an approach to improvisation and act as a training for conceptual and spatial thinking that relates directly to creative process and problem solving. During the first week of the Sidewinder Festival we are bringing a wide-ranging variety of sensibilities and strategies into a collective arena to collaborate and stimulate creative thinking and imaginings of improvisation.  Each artist will play Chinese checkers with Paxton and from that experience, create a score to be performed at the end of the week with all of the participating artists. We hope that this cross generational dialogue will evolve into a larger discussion about the new directions of the form of improvisation through all of the various activities – game playing, score making, performing, watching, teaching, talking and hanging out with each other and the community. The second week takes a slightly different approach. The concept is autonomy and collectivity. The recipe is – One out of town soloist, Three dancers and a musician in duo/trio/quartet configurations, A particular alchemy between the different groups for each night that is specifically structured to facilitate the friction and absorption between and of each other’s improvising personalities. In addition the festival workshops and studies project welcome the community into dancing, playing and discussing old and new directions of the form. We look forward to seeing you! The Curatorial Advisors, Jennifer Monson and Zeena Parkins The Movement Research Fall Festival 2008 is supported in part by The Harkness Foundation for Dance, the James E. Robison Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. .