About
Our Soundbody Improvisation workshops will act through the senses to develop body potential, exploring physicality of bodies, space, materials through improvisation, performance, reflection and discussion. We will think through and work through issues of freedom, control, spontaneity, mutuality, habit and most of all listening to others, ourselves and the spaces in which we find ourselves.
We will ask what improvisation actually means, how it applies to a listening and moving practice and how it applies to our daily lives. Working together in collaboration, the group will be thinking about objects as dynamic, living entities, connected both to personal memory and unknown possibilities. Everyday materials will become extensions of body movement and transformed into instruments.
Exercises in listening practice, breathing with sound and physical expression of various kinds will support the development of a group practice. It’s important to say that this is not a workshop about dance or music - it will be open to anybody wishing to explore close relationships between body movement, listening practice and improvisation with sound. The aim of Soundbody Improvisation is to increase confidence in movement and sound improvisation, to intensify the senses, to increase sensitivity to spaces, to develop autonomy and individuality and work towards an inclusive group language.
David Toop
musician, composer, writer, curator. Studied art and design, worked as Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at London College of Communication, currently Emeritus Professor. For more than fifty-five years he has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials.
This encompasses improvised music performance (engaging with natural processes and materials including bone conduction, resonators and buzzers, strings, paper, magnetism, archival memories, flutes, electricity and other materials), writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes nine acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo, a memoir first published in Japan in 2017 (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021) on ROOM40.
His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). From the beginning of his career he has collaborated with artists from many different fields, including sound poet Bob Cobbing, butoh dancers Mitsutaka Ishii and Min Tanaka, artist Marie Yates, contemporary dancer Miranda Tufnel and theatre director/actor Stephen Berkoff. In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Lawrence English, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977.
Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed as an Aldeburgh Faster Than Sound project in 2012. His first participation in improvisation workshops was in classes given by drummer John Stevens at Ealing College in 1971-72. As a workshop leader he taught improvisation classes at London College of Communication between 2005-2019. He has also directed workshops in Singapore, Tokyo, Madrid, Porto Alegre (Brazil), Stockholm and many other locations.
Ania Psenitsnikova
visual and performance artist and curator. Born in Estonia, studied philology at St Petersburg Institute of Humanitarian Studies at Herzen University; independent studies of vocal music, piano (with Natalia Uchitel, Olga Skorbyachenskaya and Michail Tsigutkin), violin and guitar; foundation in art at Fareham College and a BA in Performance and Visual Art (dance pathway) at the University of Brighton (2008-2011). She has traveled and learned butoh dance with Masaki Iwana, Daisuke Yoshimoto, Moeno Wakamatsu and Flavia Ghisalberti.
She has studied the teaching of contortion with Irina Vaschenko, studied ballet independently (with Ludmila Karpenko and Iryna Seletskaya), worked as a qualified aerial dance teacher and artist since 2011 and bodywork therapist since 2015. Between 2015 to the present she has collaborated with the post-activist and anti-militarist Rodina Group of artists, co-curating seven exhibitions in four countries, exploring the censorship phenomenon and participating in performances and events, include the Party of the Dead project, a satire of current Russian politics, and the Grow and Decay ecological festival in Estonia.
Their exhibition, One Can Not Be Too Careful, Feminist Edition, was nominated for the best visual art award in Brighton Festival, 2018.