Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot

COVID-19 UPDATES -

Like most artists in the UK and world-wide Freelance Dance Sector, since mid-March 2020 all of my activities in person have been suspended for the time being due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the health and social crisis ensuing. However, I have decided to keep running CI@Goldsmiths and CI@Laban, now rebranded as New X Deptford Contact Improv, online! Obviously you cannot get the feeling of touch that often is so key in this practice. But I am proposing that you try it anyway, as there is much more to learn through the approaches  stemmed from Contact Improvisation than you might think!

My forte is in using a combination of materials that build improvisation and compositional skills through embodiment, technicality, physicality and sensitivity and in bringing an artistic standard in an accessible way promoting well-being.

The material of the classes relates to Releasing Techniques, Contact Improvisation (that I usually teach quite “old school”), somatics, choreology (embodied practices of dance and performance developed by Rudolf Laban and his successors)  and martial arts. A lot of post-modern artists I have worked with: Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson, Julyen Hamilton, Kirstie Simson, Simone Forti, Angus Balbernie, etc. as well as Steve Paxton, have influenced my practice and will get referred to.  

I run two Monday evening ZOOM sessions every week until 6 July (with the possibility to be renewed). Feel free to join one or both!!

5.30-6.30pm (UK BST time): SOLO SKILLS

This session is a 1h taught class which aims at bringing us back in touch with our dancing and explorative body, and at learning new skills. It features learning patterns or movement principles (gravity, momentum, flow, sensation, directionality, 3-dimensionality, etc.) which help us making space in the body, having agency, freedom and reflexes in our movement, as well as engaging with open-ended tasks or puzzles which open up our improvisational self and our realm of possibilities. It is recommended to have a 1.8/2m x 2m space to move available, but not necessary. I also include your homely environment, and adaptations to space and to your individual body and its condition.

6.30-8pm (UK BST time): JAMMING REMOTELY

In this lightly guided session, which features a live musician every two weeks, you are invited to find your dancing body and relate to others through movement, the intermediate of our screens, and a bit of imagination. Proposing frameworks through which reading our movement and letting a collective feeling emerge, the session usually ends with a short structure which gives us a chance to witness and appreciate each other's presence, dance or experience. Payment for these sessions is on a sliding scale

You do not need to have money to take part, I really value having a mix of trained and untrained participants in my classes! Pay as little/ as much as you can (£0-10) IF you can on: paypal.me/angathiriot/

Email me at [email protected] for more information and Zoom ID meeting and password.

before (Photographer Tim Summers, Dec 2016)

Manuela Sarcone and I are developing a series of Performances as Research (The Evidence #1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) to lead us to make a work that will inhabit theatrical and unconventional spaces embodying the questions that people will have asked (or not managed to ask) us in the course of our research. In a period dealing with the uncertainty and the unknown in the international (and in particular for us, in the European) news, we wanted to contribute our practice of improvisation to approaching the scary Pandora Box of Not-knowing on a personal level. Set between UK, Italy and France, our work aims at developing physical and non-verbal communication tools that provide intuitive answers as well as opening poetic connections between people, an environment, what we consider as sensible and irrational, and the performance frame and the audience. 

Here below a Scratch Performance at Theatre Deli that we developed our Performance as Research format from, and some of our physical Research. Currently our next residency will be in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.

Simonetta Alessandri’s research and contemporary take on the phenomenon of tarantism has just been presented in its raw form at TripHazard, a performance event following a programme of artistic residencies at Trip Space, Haggerston, East London. We are a female cast of 6 dancers and a musician/composer and worked with improvisation and composition to re-enact and de-construct traditions of Southern Italy supported by Feldenkrais Method and Contact Improvisation.

We are now looking for funding to bring the work further and tour it!

For the past four years, I have run the Goldsmiths Contact Improvisation Society at Goldsmiths College with a student (Zoe Jacob, Mathilde Menezes-Fereira, Alicia Alvaro Aguilera, Jodie Granger), and co-organised day-long jams with expert Contact Improviser and teacher Simonetta Alessandri. Many dancers, musicians and teachers keep joining this ever-growing community in South-East London. Events take all size, between a small study group and a party-like event.

We are now expanding our activity and are on the look for great and innovative teachers, for musicians interested in improvising with dancers, and for collaborations and performance opportunities. Please do get in touch if interested.

A thoughtful and witty visual artist and choreographer, Annie Pui Ling Lok started off a collaboration with sound artist James Dunn in June 2014 to explore the concept of tensegrity across spatial, aural and bodily architecture through choreographic composition and programming. 

Her work has an in-depth relationship to her activity as a pedagogue and a craniosacral therapist; it considers all choreographic activity as a dialogue and looks at the inner experience of a viewer and the effect of movement and sound in space. 

After a year and a half of research the work got premiered in April 2016 by Bettina Carpi, James Dunn and I at Greenwich Dance, and is currently touring.

Programme note 

“Metaphors We Live By (MWLB) unites sound and dance in a powerful immersive live performance. A unique collaboration between dance artist Annie Pui Ling Lok and sound designer James Dunn (Cafe Oto, Resonance FM, NTS radio), MWLB explores the idea of heightening the viewer’s sensory experience of the choreography by moving sound through space.

Tara D’Arquian is a very talented and upcoming choreographer whom I have collaborated with for the first two projects of her trilogy of works on site based around Nietsche’s concept of the Eternal Return. Her pieces are ambitious, large scale and visually striking, they get the audience to move or be moved around, and display an interdisciplinary approach to choreography. 

In Situ the first piece of the trilogy was set in Asylum Chapel, Peckham (South East London), and was a Compass Commission, supported in partnership by Greenwich Dance and Trinity Laban.

Conception and Choreography: Tara D’Arquian

Performance: Anne-Gaelle Thiriot, Joel O’Donoghue, Marc Stevenson, Tara D’Arquian

Film-making/Performance: Alexandra Alisa Boanta, Lewis Davies, James Williams

Composition: Bruno Humberto and Philippe Lenzini

Scenography: Joanna Goodman, Philippinne Laureau

Lighting Design: Nao Nagai

Production: Kuo-Chieh Liang

Quests is a piece that takes over the whole building of Greenwich Borough Hall / Greenwich Dance and involves a cast of 37 performers. Set as a promenade and following a writer’s journey, “Quests is a story of love, loss and creation, in which we are constantly faced with crossroads. As a spectator of this fragmented reality, where the roads of dreams and memories are not so dissimilar, you will be led to examine your own disjointed self.”

Conception, Choreography: Tara D’Arquian

Script: Tara D’Arquian, Ottilie Parfilli, Bruno Humberto

Composition: Bruno Humberto and Phlippe Lenzini

Set Design: Yann Seabra

Lighting: Geneviève Giron

Performance: Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot, Bruno Humberto, Marc Stevenson, Ottillie Parfitt, Philippe Lenzini, Tara D’Arquian, Typhaine Delaup

An extended cast of 30 Londoners, artists, performers, dancers and amateurs joined the show each night, among which: Clara Sjölin, Esther Dee,  Julian Cox and Steve Wakeem.

2014/15 - THE TOUCH DIARIES

After a first project Grassblades based around the links between touch, music composition and the poetry of TS Elliott with choreographer/film-maker Lisa-May Thomas and composer Andy Pink, I took part in the next chapter of investigation: The Touch Diaries, a mathematical study of touch in The Touch Diaries, a vast research project involving many workshops in South West England, Universities of Bristol, Falmouth and Bath, and the making of a film directed by Lisa-May Thomas and Adam Laity featuring Verena Schneider, Will Dickie and myself.

Here is how we started

http://www.lisamaythomas.co.uk/2014/10/the-touch-diaries-project-blog-1-october-2014/#more-892

In this research that started looking at touch between human beings, the interference with technology became a primary aspect. So we started looking at touch as a technology, we created material not only for the film but for an installation/sharing/performance at the ICIA that involved performing in the galleries of the space. We made touch-sensitive interactive human statues, iPhone and Google-map based dances and Body Islands.

Here above the trailer and below behind the scenes on site! The film Touch Diaries is being screened since July 2015 in various national and international dance film festivals.

I gathered a team of 7 dancers who are professional contemporary dancers or very experienced contacters to join forces and do an improvised performance exploring space, how Contact Improvisation can meet a festive context different from its own culture and interaction with the audience. 

All benefits went to Amnesty International, one of the biggest charities protecting international human rights.

End of February and end of July 2014, Debora Di Centa, Stella Howard, Chloe Stone, Alison Curtis-Jones, Melanie Clarke and myself have worked with Valerie Preston-Dunlop to put together In Memoriam, a film commemorating the centenary of WWI. We created a big movement choir based on Rudolf Laban’s original materials and Valerie’s research and reflections, bringing together 4 groups: dancers training vocationally at Trinity Laban, young dancers from the CAT student scheme, Primary School children and a massive group of elders. All worked separately until the filming time in the Laban Creekside Greens by Roswitha Chesher. 5 brass musicians from Trinity were also involved.

The variety in the group formations and the relationships that got established in their decision-making was fascinating - How to provide enough but not too much for the participants to get the meaning of the work as an experience but to leave them the ownership was a major interest for me, and working with someone as experienced and knowledgeable as Valerie Preston-Dunlop was irreplaceable.

Since then Debora Di Centa have choreographed/co-ordinated another flashmob/movement choir event at Winchester University in October 2014.

March/July 2014

I have wanted to travel by myself for more than a decade, and this was the moment! Four months away to discover cultures, people, lands, animals and bodies that I have always been curious about: Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. This is not an informative blog, more a series of subjective descriptions and reflections as if you were traveling with me, and with my body!