Dance Training: Ability Northern Ballet

echome creates a very different environment and a very different connection between the dancers, it intensified the listening between the dancers when they were moving together and the relationships between them.

Sophie Alder, Artistic Learning Manager, Northern Ballet.

Click for audio track of video.

Ability Northern Ballet was a six-week project (May-June 2021) exploring the use of echome as a tool for dance training and performance. The workshops and performance were delivered in collaboration with Ability, a dance training programme for dancers with mild and moderate learning difficulties, run by Sophie Alder at Northern Ballet.

The sessions with echome focused on the development of skills, such as working with progressively more complex improvisation structures, responding to and controlling a sensory saturated environment, fully inhabiting a sound with one’s movement and correspondingly allowing the sound to lead the generation of movement. The project asked the following questions:

Still from video capture

• How can echome be used with a group?
• What kind of activities can facilitate a perceptual and embodied intertwining of moving and listening?
• What kind of skills can echome render possible? How might these skills relate to the aims of the Ability dance programme?
• What kind of activities can facilitate individual dancers to identify and follow the sound created by one’s movement?
• How can participants be enabled to trace the sound their movement is making, even when working in a large group?
• How can activities encourage participants to remain present in the explorations, even if their movement is not producing sound?
• How and when should the sensors be introduced?
• Should sounds be used in a specific order? Are some sounds easier to work with than others?

The final performance included three different explorations involving solo, duet and group arrangements and different sound samples.