TEACHING

Since 1993, Co-Artistic Director Annie-B Parson has been teaching dance making at New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing. In addition to teaching at ETW, she has led artistic development workshops to emerging and mid-career artists in New York City, around the country, and around the world.

“MS. PARSON, THE BESSIE, OBIE, AND GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AWARD-WINNING CO-DIRECTOR OF BIG DANCE THEATER, HAD TRAINED SEVERAL WAVES OF RISING DIRECTORS AND PERFORMERS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE WING.  BUT VERY FEW PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE PROGRAM HAD EVER SEEN HER TEACH…. THE CLASSES SOLD OUT IN 10 MINUTES.”

– Helen Shaw, The New York Sun, “So You Think You Can Choreograph?”

LECTURE

In 2007 Annie-B Parson was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. With those funds she has created a lecture/video on the practice of mid-century choreography and the virtuosity of form. The talk, which is accompanied by video and a sound score, is entitled: The Virtuosity of Structure . Her chief interest is to present the practice of mid-century post-modern choreography and its history for the benefit of non- artists to become more comfortable with abstraction in dance and theater, by relating the elements of dance to other phenomena in our lives. This talk is appropriate for groups of any size and any background; it is introductory in nature.

More info here.

The Body in Space is a 45-minute lecture about choreography. The lecture defines choreography as simply the body in space. Steps are components of choreography like words are components of plays. But Choreography is an arrangement of compositional and tonal decisions around how the body appears in space over time.

More info here.

CREATIVE WORKSHOPS

Lead Big Dance artist Elizabeth DeMent is available for choreographic workshops for non-dancers and dancers alike. These workshops look at a formal approach to creating movement phrases and theatrical events. Participants will be hyper-generative, using Big Dance’s rubric driven structures to create piles of movement phrases and theatrical events that blend the boundaries of what is generally prescribed as theater and dance.

The students will explore the expressive use of their choreographic/theatrical voice and gain insight into how postmodern performance-makers create work. They will work with ideas that include: manipulations of pure movement, the borrowing of theatrical devices, the use of found text, appropriation of historical materials, and examinations of the elements of performance.

Elizabeth DeMent giving a creative workshop at Saint Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Photo credit: Eric Wolfram for SPSBC