Improvisation Dance Workshop with Karen Kaeja of Kaeja d’Dance

GENEROUS FUNDING PROVIDED BY THE ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL

Moving separately and together, award-winning dance artist Karen Kaeja will invite you into the world of task-based scores while welcoming our intuitive bodies to devise and encounter great dances together. Warm up begins with finding a personal calm, awakening head to tail and finding ease in and out of the floor. Connecting with others in the room through a focus of being in or out of contact with body, mind, eyes and heart, will give way to our impulses where we will be both doers and witnesses. With years of research on the qualities of touch and connection, Karen brings attention to support, axis, momentum, intuition and insistence. Her investigations also source personal memory to devise movement while also asking the question – how are we present when we are somatically or performatively engaged? The effort to connect to all that is in-between the people in the room will excite the potential of instant dance making. Open to all who wish to dance.

Karen Kaeja is an award-winning performer, choreographer, community builder and project instigator. “The mastermind behind Porch View Dances” Toronto Star, she develops performance platforms provoking collaborative relationships between dancers, everyday people and the body. Co-Artistic Director of Kaeja d’Dance, her awards include the 2019 Dance Ontario Lifetime Achievement Award, the CDA “I Love Dance” Community Award and the Paul D. Fleck Fellowship for Innovation (Banff). Her performances, choreography and creations have received 7 Dora Mavor Moore nominations, including 4 Dora’s for Crave (winning one). Karen is distinguished in The Canadian Who’s Who, was a finalist for the TAF Muriel Sherrin Award for International achievement, the CDA Innovation Award, NOW’s Best Local Choreographer and twice nominated for NOW’s Best Dance Company. Commissioned and presented by performance series around the world from Newfoundland to Israel to Japan, she was the first resident dance artist for MUN/Dance NL, the Guelph Dance Festival and has done 7 creative residencies at the Banff Centre of the Arts. Karen has created 16 original Porch View Dances works, is a mentor and dramaturge for many instrumental dance artists, is Co-Artistic Director with Claudia Moore of Cloud 9 and Artistic Advisor for Jaberi Dance Theatre. She is currently working on several commissions and performances to premiere in 2020 and 2021 for Dusk Dances Chimera Project, Blue Ceiling and Guetcha Guaritcha. Karen is the movement dramaturge for the Stratford Festival’s 2020 premiere of Wendy and Peter Pan. www.kaeja.org

Photo: Dancers: Stéphanie Tremblay and Michael Caldwell, Choreographer: Karen Kaeja  (Photographer, Irina Popova)