April 24/26/28: Daisy Thompson
Photo: Peter Anderson
Class Description:
The warm-up utilizes yoga and Bartenieff fundamentals, with focus on the breath in order to notice held tension, connect to the ground with one's weight, and to engage in sensory awareness of the beginnings of movement.
Next, through simple movement phrases journeying between the floor and standing, we explore fundamental body patterning that energizes the core and articulates through the bones, to find ease and efficiency in our moving.
The final part of the class challenges the dancer 3-dimensionally moving through upside-down space, backspace and in and out of the floor. Here, a playful curiosity is encouraged, to explore the experience of moving and understanding our own bodies more deeply.
Daisy Thompson is a European settler living in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. As a dance artist who performs, creates and writes, she seeks through her work, to extend ideas of the dancing body as a key site for the questioning of embodied power relations, and considers how the dancing body interrupts cycles of contemporary logics of control in relation to culture and identity. After completing her dance training at the Laban Dance Centre in London, Daisy has had the fortune to work for Trisha Brown Dance Company (USA), Eva Karczag (Amsterdam), Emmalena Fredriksson (Sweden/Vancouver), Ugo Dehaes (Belgium) and Lee, Su-Feh (Vancouver), amongst others.
In 2010, she was selected by the Southbank Centre in London, for the DanceWeb full scholarship to participate in the ImpulseTanz Festival in Vienna.
As choreographer, she has presented her work internationally and locally. As a teacher Daisy has taught in Germany, Belgium and the UK, and regularly guest teaches in Vancouver at SFU, Training Society of Vancouver and Harbour Dance Centre. She is currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University under the co-supervision of Dr. Peter Dickinson and Dr. Laura U. Marks, and is about to be published in the October 2018 edition of Performance Matters Journal, as well as present a paper on the topic of dance and politics at a conference that will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2018.