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