Amii LeGendre
Master Class: March 2, 2009; 11-12:30 Advanced Technique
Amii LeGendre is an independent choreographer, dancer, and teacher. She lived and worked in Seattle for 15 years. In 1994, she founded a company of dancers, LeGendre Performance Group, with whom she made contact-based contemporary dance work, located in a detailed study of contact improvisation and collaborations with musicians, composers, and designers. Amii has taught contact and modern technique, improvisation and choreography, performed, and/or set work all over the country and in Canada, Hong Kong, Ecuador, and Peru. A faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts since 1998, she also teaches intermittently at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. She has choreographed over 30 works, many for groups or communities other than her company. She moved to the Hudson Valley in 2005 to raise her now three and a half year old daughter and to make dance and community there. On the East Coast, she completed a guest residency at Weslyan University (Fall 06), at Connecticut College (Fall 07), teaches modern and contact to the Bard (and beyond) community, teaches contact improvisation through Dance New England, hosts a weekly dance lab group with local dance artists, and choreographs and performs alternative dance and improvisation work with a small group of colleagues. Her work includes teaching Dance Improvisation with men in a maximum-security prison in NY.
Technique /Beyond Vertical:
"Gymnastics, capoeira, and break dancing have infiltrated contemporary dance both as vocabulary and as technique. A specialty of LeGendre, this technique class offers students a taste of these newer vocabularies by providing an understanding of their bodies in supported (safe) dancing on the floor, in the air, and upside down. Students will find courage and stability to fly into simple gymnastic tricks such as rolls, handstand, and related but more exciting manipulations. The class steadily builds isolated skills to begin, weaving in more challenging idiosyncratic choreography. The goal is to seek, adore, and make peace with disorientation in full-scale phrase work. The class stresses upper body strength to support this wild disorientation, to ultimately dance a fluid athletic vocabulary.
Amii will also be teaching a workshop in Chicago!
Beyond the Vertical dance technique and improvisation
Saturday, March 7th
12 - 3 p.m.
Links Hall (3435 N Sheffield Avenue, #207, Chicago)
$25-$35
Contact: 773-281-0824
