11-16 JUIN, 2026//   EMBODYING LANDSCAPE avec STEVE BATTS

EMBODYING LANDSCAPE// Intensive course taught by Steve Batts

A week-long movement intensive in which, using all the senses, we embed ourselves into the landscape. Later, in the studio, we recall our sensory-emotional experiences as a source for creativity in movement, creating and sharing dances connected particular spaces and places.

This intensive course is for people who love to move and who would like to explore processes through which we can create "poetic" responses, in movement to the places that we live in, visit and move through.

Embodying Landscape is a complex and rich way to activate the experience of place as a source for movement/dance composition and a way to deepen and refine the experience we have of those places. The focus of this approach is to collect experience through deep engagement with a particular environment and to use the memory of that experience and the way it stimulates the movement imagination as a source for creation of dances in the studio.

The process activates the five standard senses - vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch – and the sense of proprioception/kinaesthesia/movement in gathering and remembering experience and in the activation of desire towards movement compositions. The aim is to create dances and movement compositions that are deeply engaged with the memory of place but which are not limited to representations of places.

We will spend about half the time exploring locations in the neighbourhood of the studio, including the more natural parts and the more human influenced places, finding locations that move us and which have features that interest us to recall in the studio. The rest of the time will be spent in the studio sharing, exploring, improvising, composing and watching movement. This part of the process involves developing a heightened awareness of presence, time and space as the basis for intuitive compositional decisions.

The balance will be towards working solo but with plenty of sharing, collaborating and interacting as well.

The movement aspect of the course itself is open to anyone with an interest in movement as an art form. If you have any issues with restricted mobility please check with venue regarding practical accessibility.

Steve Batts has over forty years experience as a movement and dance artist, choreographer, performer and teacher. He is artistic director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has been performing, creating and teaching internationally for many years. His work is deeply influenced by his long practice in the Alexander Technique and by Contact Improvisation as well as by theatre, music and visual art and the comparative exploration of these in relation to dance. He is known for developing an approach to dance that he calls "poetic movement" which has a unique way of nesting the analytic elements in dancing inside the intuitive elements. One strand of his work has always been an engagement with place as a source of inspiration and stimulation for composition. This has led him to site-specific composition and to developing ways to bring the experience and memory of places outside the dance studio into the studio as a reference, inspiration and source for creating dances.

Links:

Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company (website of my company)

Vertical Nature Base – Documentary

A 30 minute documentary of one particular project that gives some context for Embodying Landscape. (It's a bit out of date but still the best video I can offer i think – there's one very short bit between 21.35 and 22.14 that kind of gives a really brief outline of Embodying Landscape.

The Cove – Clip

A very short clip of The Cove a performance work made with the Embodying Landscape process.

The Cove- Longer Clip

A longer clip (10 minutes) from The Cove