Biology & Biography Open Level
Connecting Mind and Body

After 10 years of working with and without a daily practice and with a cynical disregard for my instrument as a performer, body artist, dancer, writer - and recovering from spinal injuries I have come full circle in my approach to connecting mind (thought, belief, desire, imagination and will) with the body and with the lives we live that inform and shape us.

How much can we manipulate? When should we transform our bodies or our movements? What are we really preparing our bodies to do in daily life and what tools do we need to be fully responsive both spontaneously and reflectively?

My tools are based in methods working with and from the body: Material for the Spine (S. Paxton) Classical Pilates, Iyengar and Vinyasa Yoga, Aikido and chinese medicine. It will be a demanding approach to training both the body, the mind and the will to work directly with our biographies and our biologies their strengths and weaknesses to achieve strong and connected movement ready for any style or vocabulary.




Biology & Biography Advanced
our secrets and our resistances and a daily physical mind training

What does it mean to move with precision, with concentration, centred, connected and completely articulated and intelligent, fully conscious and able to move into extreme forms and power? Is this "technique"? Is this a goal? Is this authentic? Is this "contemporary"? Is it "boring" or worse pernicious? I don't believe so.
I believe that our art benefits as body movement artists from having a separate and regular training distinct from the vocabularies each piece may inspire us to investigate. The aim of this class is to bring Intention into full consciousness allowing the ideas and impulses to have healthy and connected access to all tools of expression necessary for the act at hand.

I would like to offer a daily physical mind training, working with pilates, yoga, material for the spine and deep tissue touch techniques. This part of the workshop is a technical warm up, tuning and training for precision of movement and muscular and core work. We will be looking at tools of training and creative research and explore what performance and power mean to us.
What are our needs as a performer? How well should we know ourselves and our secrets and our resistances in order to perform effectively and if so does acute conscious awareness impede our creativity?

Especially as a solo artist working within personal biography and biology, this question of uniqueness of idiosyncratic movement and behaviour is most intriguing to me. After working with Steve Paxton for 2 years the most valuable lesson he impressed upon me was finding my daily practise. Technique is only useful if you can use it. Discipline is the technique. Developing trust to know one's self deeply and work with it, enhance it all the while trusting that our unique voice is more than our obvious idiosyncracies. This is why precision movement and prowess once again became a part of my daily practise. It is in assimulating the entire human mind, body, imagination, facts and fantasy where I find creativity and expression at it's most powerful and still there are layers and layers of mystery and humour that are revealed.


Ami Garmon
Ami Garmon (USA), lives and works between Berlin and France.
She collaborates with visual and sound artists to create performance installations that are intense poetic and immersive atmospheres for her writings, her voice and her dances. She improvises and performs in collaboration with her own group productions or as a performer for others. Her interest has always been on emotion and nostalgia and surfaces both real and projected.

Her focus on writing and performance and precision of movement means that her works stretch over diverse fields and mediums. Her latest work "Take me home with you" proposes a threefold project that is a piece, a book and an audio cd, revealing a desire to enlarge the experience of her work into the private sphere of one's own time and home.

Her works are mutable collections of expression and reflection. Her latest solo "Take me home with you" was premiered at the Festival Uzes France and Tanznacht Berlin. She was a member of the improvisation ensemble of Jeremy Wade and Meg Stuart for the festival Politics of Ecstacy in HAU Berlin. She is invited to perform and teach in Performatica festival in Mexico. Her current project "Another Fucking Solo", a duo plus live music is planned for winter 2010.