Katie Duck Workshop
Katie Duck has been teaching workshops internationally since the mid 70’s alongside her professional career as a performer and choreographer. She integrates her current research making each workshop completely unique. She draws from her experiences with live performance, music collaborations, director and choreographer. She has lead two companies over the past 30 year; Groupo based in Italy - Magpie based in the Netherlands.
Over the past 10 years her workshops have been titled “improvisation” in order to emphasis her views of theater as a live time art form reflective of how she executes her own professional performances.
Katie’s workshops are aimed toward all dance, performance and music artists. She does not aim to provide a technique or style for how one conducts them-self in a live performance. Her work is relevant for any performance situation without discrimination for levels or performance platforms. She asks that anyone who chooses to study with her have an intense interest in the work and is willing to experiment and take risks with the material she offers.
Her warm-up and exercises emphasis how the eyes and the ears work in co ordination with movement, sound and exposure to gathered crowds altering our perception of time, space and emotions. Improvisation sessions revolve around the terms pause, flow, exit and presence as choices with discussions articulating play, memory, intuition and feelings.
Her aim is to provide a situation where artists can practice together and grow in confidence toward public performances with an objective to share her views about improvisation not being the antitheses of choreography or composition but rather the way the choreography and composition can be executed, that the mental connection to this practice can be accessed weather they are doing set or open framed performance pieces, that definitions of what improvisation within art practices mean today is reflective of advances in brain-studies and technology shifting the way we can contribute as artists in the theatrical setting to gathered live crowds and that an artist’s commitment to share feelings with a public in a live setting is in and of it’s self meaningful.
International workshop up - dates
Magpie umbrella apprentice program - director Katie Duck
Magpie umbrella summer intensive
Recourse material
Books - Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio / The Feeling of what Happens by Antonio Damasio / Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio
Dr. Sharon Smith - thesis - practicing presence
