A dance improvisation workshop for professionals or advanced students with Megan Bridge (Fidget, Philadelphia USA)
“Widening the Circle” is an invitation into the moment, into mindfulness, and into acute awareness.
Improvisation, at its center, is a decision-making process. Tracking the movement allows the artists to make compositional choices in real time, and as their ability to track in the moment grows, they gain confidence in designing immediate somatic responsiveness.
Improvisational dance is also a shared practice of listening with one’s collaborators: music/musicians, other dancers, the space, the audience.
“We work to observe all these influences with the body, and we approach vision, and the way we use our eyes and gaze, as an extension of our movement practice. “Widening the circle” refers to our desire to expand perception, of allowing in as many collaborators as possible into our making in the moment.
In “Widening the Circle: Composing Somatically”, Megan Bridge’s teaching draws on her own decades-long investigations into dancing improvisationally and her intensive study with masters of improvised dance such as Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Manfred Fischbeck, and Merian Soto.
Megan Bridge is a dancer, choreographer, producer, and dance scholar based in Philadelphia. She is the co-director of Fidget, a platform for her collaborative work with composer, designer, and musicologist Peter Price. With Fidget, Bridge has presented her work at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, FringeArts, and many other venues throughout Philadelphia and the United States, and abroad in Austria, Bulgaria, Colombia, France, Germany, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland, South Africa, & Switzerland. She has received funding support for her work from USArtists International, The Network of Ensemble Theaters, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, American Dance Abroad, and more. Bridge has worked with Jerome Bel, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Susan Rethorst, Willi Dorner, & Group Motion, and has studied with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, & Deborah Hay. In 2020 she staged Bel’s work Gala at the Miami Institute of Contemporary Art, and in 2016 she was rehearsal assistant to David Gordon. In 2013 Bridge was named “Best of Philly” for stage performance by Philadelphia Magazine. She is also a dance writer, and has published articles in Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, The Dance Chronicle, and at thINKingDANCE.net, where she served as an editor and as Executive Director from 2014-2016. Bridge holds a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase, and an MFA in dance from Temple University. Her teaching practice is particularly focused on improvisation and contemporary dance. She currently teaches in the dance department at Temple University, and regularly teaches and performs as a guest artist at Universities throughout the Philadelphia area. In recent years she has taught dance workshops in Poland, France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Tbilisi, Georgia.
Without Distance Platform is part of the project „Life Long Burning (LLB) – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe”, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union and National Culture Fund, in partnership with the Tempus Fugit project, organized by the Goethe-Institut Bulgarien and the French Institute of Bulgaria, on an idea of Metheor, in the frame of the French-German Cultural Fund.