Making Connection - November Session
Register for Making Connections
Session overview
Making Connections is a monthly free drop in event for Swindon and SW creatives. Yael Flexer will lead a 2-hour improvisation workshop using ideas from her work ‘Acting Our Age’ and this will be followed by a networking/informal meet facilitated by the Making Connections team.
The workshop
We will begin with solo improvisation work on the floor building towards more dynamic duet and group improvisation. Rooted in Yael’s ongoing intergenerational improvisation classes and practice and drawing on ideas from Flexer & Sandiland’s immersive interactive production Imagining Otherwise the workshop focuses on developing a connection to our bodies and each other as a responsive ecology, using imagery, experiential anatomy and playful exploration. Group improvisation will be followed by a short section of simple set exercises. The third part of the workshop will move on to explore improvisational performance scores and may incorporate work with text drawing on Flexer & Sandiland’s production ‘Acting Our Age’.
Yael Flexer
Yael is Co-artistic director of Flexer & Sandiland with digital artist Nic Sandiland. Yael originally formed the company as Choreographer in Residence at The Place Theatre, London. To date she has created 15 full-length productions, touring throughout the UK and internationally. Live and/or digital commissions include works for: Brighton Festival, Brighton Digital Festival, Hull Dance, South East Dance, Sadler’s Wells, Barbican Centre & Birdmask. Current touring productions include the immersive interactive live work Imagining Otherwise & intergenerational Acting Our Age and the touring installations An Elevated Platform and An Obscure Camera. Recent productions and commissions include Curiouser (2020) co-produced with dybwikdans, Norway, movement direction for artist Rita Evans (Towner Gallery), new works and restaging for London Contemporary Dance School, Dance East & Stavanger University, Norway. Flexer & Sandiland run intergenerational classes online and in-studio as partner company at South East Dance, Brighton. Previous company productions include: Disappearing Acts (2016), Weightless (2012-14), The Living Room (2010-2011) and digital works The Hum (2017-2021), Border Control (2022) Weighting (2015-2017), Trip Hazard (2013-ongoing) and Gravity Shift (2010-2017). Commissions as an independent artist include, among others: E-Werk Tanz Festival, Motus Fetival, National Youth Dance Company Scotland, Ludus Dance, Edge, Scottish Dance Theatre, Trinity-Laban, mapdance, Maslool (Israel), Stavanger University (Norway) Encore East, Three Score Dance and numerous youth commissions for C.A.T and independent youth programmes. Yael leads workshops, professional training and mentoring projects in the UK and internationally. A reader in Dance Yael directs mapdance, the University of Chichester’s MA/postgraduate touring company.
