Hana van der Kolk received her MFA in choreography from University of California, Los Angeles’ Department of World Arts and Cultures where she taught dance improvisation, site-specific performance, composition and yoga. At UCLA, Hana also served as a teaching assistant to Professor Susan Foster in Introduction to Dance Studies and to Professor Peter Sellars in Art as Social Action. Hana is a regular visiting artist at the School for New Dance Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, The Netherlands. She was on the faculty of Fritz Haeg’s groundbreaking Sundown Schoolhouse in Los Angeles and has taught classes and workshops at University of Southern California’s Department of Architecture, Otis College of Art and Design, Earthdance in Western Massachusetts, Movement Research and The Bridge for Dance in New York City, Skidmore College, Sarah Lawrence College, and The National Dance Museum in upstate New York, through DanceBank at the Open Space and Farm Lab in Los Angeles, and at several public and private high schools. She is the founder and director of Genesis Project, Los Angeles, a forum for dialogue about interdisciplinary, body-based artistic practice and a month-long, process-based artists’ residency. Hana is committed to facilitating an environment wherein the definition of dance is rigorously questioned, utilizing ways of thinking proposed by experimental music and conceptual and visual art to expand this definition. She is curoius about reclaiming the notion of choreography for use in the discussion of all temporal and spatial engagements.
Sample Class Descriptions
This is Dancing is a contemporary dance technique class. We begin with a slow warm up drawing from yoga, mindfulness meditation, the Alexander Technique, Body Mind Centering, and various dance traditions. With a focus on cultivating kinesthetic awareness and heightening mental presence we then move fluidly between improvised and “set” material, investigating how the states inhabited in each might inform the other. Taking responsibility for our thoughts and awareness as much as our limbs, we practice simple, repetitive movements and phrases that draw from jazz, Hip Hop, modern dance, and West African movement vocabularies. Class might finish with a combination set to music (think Arcade Fire, Janet Jackson, Prince, Animal Collective, Justin Timberlake, Nina Simone) and/or scores for practicing improvised choreography. Throughout class we consider composition as we practice technique, noticing and discussing what we see as much as we attend to what we do. Reclaiming joy, pleasure and abandon from the club, party, and private living room dance for the classroom, we move, sweat, play, and dance together in a collective space of exploration and positivity. This is Dancing draws inspiration from the work of Deborah Hay, Simone Forti, d. Sabela Grimes, Germaine Acogny, Merce Cunningham, and many others.
Choreographing Consciousness, Improvising the Body: Dance Improvisation
This course serves as an advanced training in dance improvisation, focusing on the tradition of various post modern, Euro-American techniques of the form. The class pays special attention to the diverse approaches to perception and presence found in the field, drawing on the practice/performance techniques of Simone Forti, Janet Adler, Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, Jennifer Monson, Anne Bogart, Martin Keogh, Julyen Hamilton, Ishmael Huston-Jones, and Steve Paxton. Through in-depth movement exploration in solos, duets, and groups students are asked to consider the relationship of consciousness to the dancing body, while also being challenged to find new ways of moving, composing spontaneously, and perceiving and manipulating time and space while dancing. Students read material contextualizing the approaches we explore and write about and discuss their experiences of dancing in class.
Sense of A Place
How does a body address/illuminate the place in which it exists/moves? As an introductory workshop this class emphasizes exercises aimed at heightening perceptions of oneself and one’s surroundings while moving and in stillness. These approaches lay the groundwork for considering ways of improvising and composing movement in site-specific locales. As an extended course the class includes regular practice of these techniques along with readings and live performance and video viewing. Students then choose a location and develop an intensive relationship to it through research, journaling, documentation through a diversity of media, and creating movement compositions both in and about the site. Students consider how performers might interact with the space to accentuate specific aspects (e.g. historical, social, aesthetic, architectural) of it, and how an audience might experience a performance in that location: through passive viewing from a seating area, through continuous physical participation in the event, by way of participation through reading, writing, or talking, or other modes of engagement. Students are asked to consider how the event will be advertised, how the audience will be engaged throughout, and other key considerations that frame the performance.
Four Approaches to Presence: An Advanced Composition Class
For the advanced choreography student, this class examines works of several contemporary choreographers and performance artists such as Deborah Hay, Jennifer Monson, Marina Abramovic, and Janine Antoni, among others. Through readings, video viewing, museum visits and lectures, students analyze the artists’ philosophies, creative processes, and final products. They are then asked to create original works in the styles of the four central artists examined. Classes consist of discussions, composition and improvisation exercises, and feedback sessions on the students’ compositions.
Yoga
Classes are inspired by a creative blend of yoga styles including Anusara, Integral Yoga, and Freedom Yoga in the style of Erich Schiffman, and draw on studies of other movement techniques and awareness practices such as Body Mind Centering, The Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation, and Insight Meditation. Emphasizing mindfulness of the breath and a sense of play and exploration, the class facilitates each student in finding how the practice can be a means for the restoration of mental and physical balance through relaxation as well as physical challenge. Please visit www.hanayoga.org for more information.