Teaching
Jill Sigman and other
jill sigman/thinkdance
collaborators and dancers offer workshops and courses on a
range of creative subjects related to Sigman’s choreographic
work. Workshops can be given in various formats (afternoon,
weekend intensive, weeklong, university semester) and can be
customized to the specific needs or experience of a
particular group.
All workshops involve an exploration of creative material as
well as concluding discussion with participants. Teaching
activities sometimes culminate in a showing or performance.
While technique classes are also available, emphasis is
placed on workshops that bring students some aspects of
Sigman’s own creative process.
With extensive background in academic environments, Sigman is
an exceptional university instructor. Her teaching mission is
to engage dance students broadly:
My
goal in a university setting is to guide students to be more
inquisitive, open, and thoughtful in experiencing, creating,
and advocating for dance. I would like my students to learn
to think in a more detailed and fine-grained way about dance
as a product of history, politics, economics, and cultural
trends; to speak articulately about its role in building
personal identity, community, and culture; and to appreciate
a multiplicity of dance forms with different focal points and
origins. In a larger sense, I would like to see my students
become aware of their own civic agency in shaping a rich and
healthy society, and of the many roles that dance and the
arts can play in that endeavor.
Featured workshops by
jill sigman/thinkdance:
Movement and Theatricality:
The Interface Between Character and Abstract
Dance
Participants will explore the interface between theatricality
and movement. How can dancers begin to create movement that
seems quasi-narrative or character-based without approaching
it as an actor might? How does pure movement shade into
theater? We will study this through fine-grained
improvisational work with the sternum and spine, which leads
into realignment of the skeleton and new strategies for
locomotion.
Site-Specific Performance:
Making Dance Anywhere
Participants will explore the process of creating
site-specific work through improvisation exercises and short
compositions in non-traditional spaces (hallways, stairways,
bathrooms, outdoors, etc.) What is it to make a dance for a
particular space? What does it mean to respect the space or
use it as a partner? Participants will be given various tools
to interact with spaces architecturally, energetically,
visually, historically.
Visual Metaphor
Sometimes movement images seem to have a significance or
meaning that goes beyond the movement. Participants will
explore how to create visual metaphors by developing and
manipulating movement, text, and objects. Emphasis will be on
becoming virtuosic in the use of small objects and spatial
elements in order to generate surprising interactions and new
possibilities for meaning.
Other workshops offered by
jill sigman/thinkdance
include:
Making Dances in the Real World: Composition and Political
Awareness
Body, Movement, and Gender: Dancing as Female or Male
Interdisciplinary Performance: Building Relationships Between
Dance and Other Media
Composition and the Filmic Eye: How Video Strategies can
Inform Dancemaking
A Snapshot of American Dance History through Improv and
Repertory
Improvisation: Text, Site, and Games
Modern Technique
Semester-long Course:
Composing in the Real World:
Making Dance Permeable
This semester long course designed for universities explores
dance composition by looking at the question of how dances
can attach to the real world. While keeping formal features
and traditional aspects of composition in mind, we will focus
on ways that a dance can be derived from or incorporate
things that originate outside the studio and ways that a
dance might extend its impact beyond the studio. We will
consider how dancemaking need not be separated from the rest
of life, but can be integrated with who we are and what we do
in our lives outside the studio. The course is divided into 4
units:
1) Found objects and alternate virtuosities
2) Dancing about something
3) Dancing in the real world
4) Creating a web around the work
To discuss or arrange a workshop or course, please contact:
jill sigman/thinkdance
235 West 102 Street, #14T
New York, New York 10025
thinkdance@attglobal.net