Winter Festival 2010 Teachers

Olivier Besson

Olivier Besson is an improvisational movement artist who hails from France and is based in Boston. Olivier studied Contact Improvisation with Robin Feld, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson and Andrew Harwood, and Improvisation / Real Time composition with Daniel Lepkoff and Julyen Hamilton. He has also studied and performed Bugaku (court dance from Japan) with Arawana Hayashi. Olivier’s work has been presented at many venues in the US and internationally, including at Dance Theatre Workshop (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), Boston Dance Umbrella, Florida Dance Festival, the National Institute of the Arts (Taipei, Taiwan), Die Pratze (Tokyo), Art of Movement Festival (Yaroslav, Russia), Micadanses and Studio Genty (Paris).  He has collaborated with many individuals including Chris Aiken, Lisa Schmidt/Lani Nahele, Debra Bluth, Liz Roncka, Rick Brostoff, Ming-Shen Ku, Toshiko Oiwa, Emmanuelle Pepin and musicians/composers Mike Vargas and Peter Jones.

 

Olivier is currently on faculty at The Boston Conservatory (dance division). He has been on faculty at Canal Danse (Paris), the French National Circus School (CNAC), the Bates Dance Festival, Emerson College and the School of Fine Arts at Boston University.

 

Jeff Bliss

Jeff has been exploring and learning about Contact Improvisation for 28 years. Jeff began performing contemporary dance with Betty Jones in Hawaii and then joined Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange for 8 years. 

He traveled and taught improvisation in places like Zagreb, Belgrade  and London, UK. In New York City he taught CI for Movement Research for 4 years. He has taught Contact at the National Dance Festival in Argentina and in Osaka, Japan and Hong Kong. He has also taught improvisation at the following US universities: Wesleyan University, Smith College, Dartmouth College, University of Hartford, and James Madison University.

As a member of Group 6 (w/Chris Aiken, Nancy Stark Smith, Ray Chung, Julie Carr, & Peter Bingham) he explored performance issues in contact improvisation. Jeff, Nancy and musician Mike Vargas have performed as a trio at Naropa University in Colorado, at the Bates Dance Festival in Maine and at the CI36 Festival in 2008.

Daniel Davis

Daniel Bear Davis has been teaching and dancing CI for 10 years. He utilizes the form in his dance theatre company, Shah and Blah Productions as well as in acrobatic stilt theatre work with The Carpetbag Brigade. He has been influenced by his study of Axis Syllabus: Universal Motor Principles with Frey Faust and by his massage practice. He has also been influenced by the countless bizarre apparatuses and architectures he has performed on including construction scaffolding, boulders in the desert, the walls of a boat, a submarine, a suspended welded sphere, and many more. For Daniel, one of the great joys of contact lies in the constant exploration and discovery that develops the form. A Boston native, he's happy to return here after years in California and Europe, to share his research and inspirations.

Catherine Lessard

For the last 10 years, Catherine Lessard has been exploring what she calls the ‘Contact Weave’. She transmits with passion and coherence the key principles of Improvised Dancing and Contact Improvisation. She has studied and performed with dancers of international reputation such as Nancy Stark Smith, Andrew Harwood, Kirstie Simpson, Patricia Kuypers and Ray Chung. She also has experience in Body-Mind Centering (BMC), Authentic Movement, and butoh, and has professional training in music and communications. Combining, in a unified pedagogy, both a sharp vision of art and a hungry curiosity for science, Catherine has been teaching and performing contact improvisation regularly since 2003 in Montreal (Bizz studio, 303, Fleur d’Asphalte, Dojos) and in France (Canal Danse). She is a member of the PIE (Performance Improvisation Exchange) collective in Montreal. From 2007 to 2010, she served as president of the Montreal Association for Contact Improvisation (ACI).

Catherine's workshops are explorations of human expression through breathing, awareness, non-judgement and various nuances of touch and movement, offered in an atmosphere of respect and playful discovery.

Dey Summer