Nita Little \\ first call

topic posted Fri, January 4, 2008 - 5:20 AM by  Rossella
Caravajal15 residenza dinamica
International Projects 2008

Orvieto \ Italy
April 25–May 2 / 2008

Nita Little
Restless Peace
A mind in motion and Contact Improvisation experience
Residential project for experienced movers

The American performer Nita Little will be the special guest of our association, first time in Italy as guest artist, for giving the project “Restless Peace”. The intensive workshop with Nita Little is in the calendar of our Residential Projects 2008, and will be from April 25 to May 2, 2008 in the beautiful Etruscan city of Orvieto, in middle Italy.

After the end of the workshop, on May 3rd and 4th, the association will plan also two days with the International Springfest Jam.

The intensive workshop and the Jam will be held both at the headquarters of the cultural Association Caravajal15 residenza dinamica, in the prestigious sixteenth century rooms of the Palazzo Caravajal-Simoncelli, in Orvieto.

Application for registration in the project with Nita Little is open from January 7th. For information and more details write to: info@contactfestival.it, or telephone to +39 0763.341479.

Nita Little
Restless Peace
The urge to move, to go where we have never been, is the soul of our practice in this workshop.
Developing a "home base", a place of personal and creative safety is as important as the journey; how wonderful to be free when you have a home! We learn, how like nomads, we may carry our home with us, even as we track paths in and out of unfamiliar territory.
We focus on developing the mental, emotional, and physical skills that enable dancers to travel creatively. Utilizing a full dance vocabulary, we integrate gestured movement improvisation with contact improvisation and build the skills to consciously weave these two forms.

We investigate “states” of mind / “states” of body as a means to develop and direct creative work in our improvisations. Developing the ability to describe and craft subtle levels of action and experience, we boost our physical potential while increasing our readability. Moving in solo, duet and group forms, we gain compositional tools for structural orientation; like torches, they light the way.

This workshop is developed for experienced movers who wish to pass beyond the threshold of old patterns. The restless human drive that takes us out of comfort, urges us to meet the unfamiliar, to move into, through and with the unknown, is a dance artist’s call. Here, we harness that drive and discover how, moving at the speed of our restless calling, we can find peace.

This class culminates in a creative work for performance at the workshop and at Zipfest08.

Things we will do:
Go deep into the physical philosophy behind contact improvisation.
Learn underlying CI principles that manifest as pathways of action.
Build the tools for safe physical and creative relationships
Discover different spatial orientations: vertical/hierarchical and horizontal/diffuse.
Learn about our temporal orientation and develop tools that modulate time.
Develop the skills to be able to move freely between states of mind.
Deepen our agreements to open to life, to the dance.
Honor peace.

about Nita Little
www.nitalittle.com
Nita Little has been developing, choreographing, performing and teaching improvisational dance for the past thirty-six years, notably Contact Improvisation, which she helped evolve from its inception with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and others.
She collaborated in numerous performing companies introducing Contact Improvisation throughout the United States. She is a master teacher with former students all over the world, who are themselves now master dancers and teachers: Gretchen Spiro, Andrew Harwood, Frey Faust, Scott Wells, Julie Oak, Peter Bingham to name just a few. Through CI she discovered her abiding interest in the evolution of consciousness and the mind body relationship. Since 1981 she has been developing an evolving curriculum called The Mind in Motion, which explores the range of experiential states along the mind-body continuum and reveals principles that define Contact Improvisation as well as other movement forms. This work is informed by her investigation of the mind through work such as hypnotherapy and NeuroLinguistic Programming.

As a performing artist her current work is a mix of both formal and improvisational choreography and scores. While anchored in process, it frequently explores character, story, and concept.

Nita received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in choreography and was on the California Arts Council Touring Program.
The latter award was to her solo dance company, NITA LITTLE DANCE THEATRE, which she began in 1984, continued through 1990, and reinstated as a pickup company in 2000. In 2002 Nita created Playing God, an hour-long dance opera that received funding through the Dance USA /National Endowment for the Arts.

Over the years Nita has been both faculty and guest artist at numerous colleges and universities including New York University, California Institute for the Arts, Texas Christian University, Temple University, Tufts University, Scripps College and UC Santa Barbara.

Nita teaches and performs yearly at national and international dance festivals including ImPulsTanz, Vienna, The Side Step Festival, Helsinki, Kontakt Budapest International Improvisation Festival, the International Contact Festival Freiburg, Germany,the Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation and the West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival, Berkeley California.
She also teaches locally and nationally throughout the year. She lives with her son in Santa Cruz Mountains in California.

As she has pioneered a path in the understanding of the mind/body/spirit relationship, Nita's mission, conscious evolution, has been the backbone of her passion and her practice. Her goal is to see, feel and reveal grace in all its forms and as it exists in the actions of the mind and the body.


Info and reservation
Caravajal15 residenza dinamica
Via Malabranca 15
05018 Orvieto (TR) - Italy
tel +39 0763.341479
fax +39 0763.340669
info@contactfestival.it
www.contactfestival.it
posted by:
Rossella
Italy