Workshop: DIY Solo Creation & Dance Improv
A workshop for all performers and improvisers.
February 17, 2022
6:00 – 9:00 pm
At The Output, 100 Arthur St, 2nd floor
For building access info, click here https://art-space.ca/accessibility-info/, or email younglungs.wpg@gmail.com.
Venue will be at reduced capacity to ensure physical distancing, limited spots are available. Payment is sliding scale $5-$50.
Click HERE to register!
As per the current Provincial Health Orders, proof of vaccination is required upon entry. Participants who are not able to provide proof of double vaccination will not be given entry to the facility. Face masks are mandatory.
About the Workshop:
Meagan O’Shea teaches DIY Solo Creation and Ensemble Improv throughout North America, Europe and beyond.
This workshop will focus on generative improv strategies, working with each individual’s source material. Moving together in-person with physical distancing in place, we will expand the exploration to the social body and practice composing together in real time. We will also work on solo sourcing and developing material that we will share with each other at the end of the workshop.
Meagan fuses contemporary dance and performance practices with theatre, storytelling, clown, comedy, DIY spectacle in her interdisciplinary, interactive solo works. Using some of her favourite tools, we’ll play with extrapolating from a theme to generate material and about it in interesting ways.
Meagan has developed her Oblique/Switch creative methodology through her training and work with Keith Hennessy, Ruth Zaporah, Nina Martin and voice work with Katherine Duncanson, Fides Krucker, Allessio Castonelli (The World is Sound), John Turner, Karen Hines, devised theatre with One Yellow Rabbit, and countless other workshops and trainings. Her work is supported through her dance, somatic, pilates, and yoga practices.
About Meagan O’Shea (she | her) Canada/Germany
Working across forms and borders, queer, contemporary dance+ artist Meagan O’Shea devises “Uplifting, energetic and totally out of the ordinary” performances for real and imagined spaces.
Working with Oblique/Switch as a generative research method to reach beyond the Obvious/1st Impulse and Opposite/2nd Impulse to discover The Oblique/3rd Impulse; the potential to disrupt dominant paradigms, and offer an alternative to binary systems, she creates content-driven, problem-finding, contemporary solo work, treating the process like a science experiment, she uses body and the interaction with the audience as test site.
Meagan’s award-nominated solo work has been presented across Canada, in New York, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Ireland, Finland, Austria, Greece and Germany. Meagan has also refined an ensemble improv practice through the ongoing “dance like no one is watching” performance project, which animates/disrupts public space, has included over 200 dancers and reached 30,000 incidental audience. She is currently working on Anatomalia (anatomy+anomaly+femalia), 7 choreographies set in immersive, installed environments tracking the transformation in healing trauma to find joy.
Meagan teaches DIY Solo Making and Ensemble Improv in North America and Europe. In 2007 Meagan founded Stand Up Dance as a platform to amplify her vision and support her work and that of other artists and communities. She is co-founder of hub14 in Toronto, was International Associate Artist at Dance Ireland for three seasons, Associate Artist at Theatre Direct, BIDE Artistic Collaborator (12-14), and has created much of her work through international residencies. She is a recipient of the KM Hunter Award in Dance and twice been shortlisted for the Guggenheim Fellowship.
This workshop is made possible with the generous support from Manitoba Arts Council. Thanks also to our partner Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
