BEGINNERS PROGRAMME - WEEK 1

Hatha yoga with Hugo Mega

Hatha yoga is seen as one of the most traditional styles of yoga. This ancient practice focuses on balance, bringing the Yin and Yang, the Sun (Ha) and the Moon (Tha) together into the body. This slower paced, static practice focuses on building a strong foundation and understanding each posture. In this class you will explore the benefits of Pranayama, breathing exercises as a new relation to abdominal and lumbar support. When teaching this style Hugo emphasizes breath awareness while developing your alignment and building a safe practice.

Hugo Mega (PT)

Hugo Mega is a Portuguese yogi, artist, dreamer, and life coach based in Brussels, Belgium. Hugo’s passion for movement & artistic endeavors are the pulse of his life. He dedicated his undergraduate studies to exploring his body’s physical capacities through dance and circus. After finishing his circus studies, yoga enters center stage of his explorative focus. What starts as a nice way to stay in shape, becomes a passion. This changes his life and his perspective on the body. Yoga becomes a lifestyle and in 2014 he starts teaching at Yyoga in Brussels. This urban sanctuary becomes his second home, where he is a core member of the family. When teaching Yoga Hugo is passionate about alignment and anatomy, exploring new ways to connect to the body focusing on awareness and injury prevention. He desires now to support you on your journey of perspective, sharing with you the great practices that support him throughout his journey.

Contemporary technique class with Katie Vickers

This class is designed to train the eye and senses to explore movement from the inside out. We place emphasis on various tonalities and momentum while discovering efficiency in freedom of the joints, use of weight, swing and breath. Special attention is placed to points of initiation and realizing how we are dancing in the moment, specifically looking at anatomic and mechanical specificity. How do we integrate movement initiated from multiple points within the body? What does it mean to dance into the floor rather than on top of the floor? What does it mean to push into the floor? How do we integrate movement initiated from multiple points within the body?

Katie Vickers (US)

Katie Vickers is an American artist living between Philadelphia and Barcelona. She is a 2014 graduate of P.A.R.T.S. and 2010 graduate of The Ohio State University. She has danced for and with Daniel Linehan (USA), Martin Nachbar (GE), Benjamin Vandewalle (BE), Vera Tussing (GE), Albert Quesada (SP) and most recently was a guest artist for the Cullberg Ballet’s production, Figure a Sea, choreographed by Deborah Hay. She has conducted workshops internationally, and spearheaded the Mercersburg Academy Summer Program for Dance and Theatre in the U.S as well as Practicing Performance at The Ohio State University. Her choreography has been supported and performed across Europe and in the US.

Project workshop with Claire Croizé

An intimate narration: from the individual to the collective.
It is with great pleasure that I would like to share the artistic practice I have developed along the years to create my own dance pieces .

The body in relation to music, silence and to the affect it creates has always been at the core of my choreographic work. With my last creations EVOL and Flowers (we are), I particularly focused on developing a personal and musical body language for each dancer based on their inner introspection. Creating short ‘speeches’ with the body will be one of our goals.

We will start the workshop by improvising two by two in silence and with our eyes closed. Dancing with our eyes closed will help us to wake up our bodies and to focus deeply on our feelings and sensations without any influences from the outside. Gradually, we will open up towards the others and to the space whilst striving to keep the integrity and strength of our inner focus. From there, we will add particular emphasis to the musicality of our movements and to the space.

Improvising for the other with the eyes open will help us to create a personal language as if we were literally ‘talking’ with our body. We will confront our little dance with an external musical source, classical and pop rock music. Our challenge will be to not lose our own internal voice even if we work with powerful music. The intention being that an intimate narration should appear from this quest, going from a personal speech to a shared dialogue between the participants.

I would also like to give a text as an external source to compose movements. Expressing a text through the body is another strong interest of mine. It creates a particular rhythmicality and triggers the imagination in a strong personal way. Finally, we will focus on the group, without losing the individual. We will first work on creating a dialogue with our partner. Then we will work on partnering while supporting each other’s movements. We will compose one big crescendo all together and try to remain connected all the time as one body moving through the space.

Claire Croizé (FR)

For Claire Croizé, the body is a sensitive instrument, resonating with the dancer’s complex emotional life. Claire graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2000 and, after working as an artist in residence at wpZimmer, founded the company Action Scénique in 2008 together with Nada Gambier and Etienne Guilloteau. In 2016, Claire and Etienne continued their close collaboration together under a new name, ECCE. Music, especially live music, plays a prominent role in their work. The philosophy of ECCE is about movement and physicality; their aim is to show the dancer as a concrete physical individual. Some of Claire’s previous productions include Affected (2006), The Farewell (2009, Prix Jardin d’Europe), Primitive (2014), EVOL (2016) and Flowers (we are) (2019). EVOL was named one of the best dance productions of 2016 by the Theaterfestival and the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. In 2017, she co-created with Etienne Guilloteau Mer- (2017) and in 2019 Pole Reports From Space (2019). ECCE is affiliated with Concertgebouw Brugge for the period 2017-2020.