04/22/2017
FREE MASTER CLASS WITH KENT DESPAIN!! Sunday 4-23 at 1pm in Mather Dance Building
*All skill levels welcome!
*Both his book and film can be found at KSL.
KENT DE SPAIN is recognized for his work as a movement/theater artist, master teacher, and researcher. He received his B.A. in Dance and M.A. in Choreography from U.C.L.A., and his Ed.D. in Dance Studies from Temple University. He has taught and toured throughout the United States and beyond, including performances at Jacob's Pillow and Judson Church, and has been a guest artist with Grupo Tran Chan, Kei Takei and Moving Earth, Lower Left, and Ausdruckstanz. He has been the recipient of several major awards, including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography and an Established Choreographers Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He also received a Performance Fellowship from the Philadelphia Repertory Development Initiative that commissioned choreographer Ralph Lemon to create an original work, So this is the hero, for he and his partner Leslie Dworkin. He was also nominated for a B. Iden Payne Award as Best Director for his Butoh-based production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade. De Spain has taught master classes and workshops for dancers and actors in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and has been on faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia College (SC), University of Georgia, Oberlin College, U.C.L.A., and the University of North Carolina - Greensboro.
De Spain is internationally recognized for his research, documentation, and teaching on the experience and process of improvisation, particularly in movement. He wrote a series of articles for the journal Contact Quarterly examining the relationship between movement improvisation and recent scientific thought (Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory, Neuropsychology). He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Improvisation at Ohio State University. His dissertation, Solo Movement Improvisation: Constructing Understanding Through Lived Somatic Experience, is still the most comprehensive academic study of improvisational process yet undertaken, and his essay, The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports From the Inside of Improvisation, appears in the book “Taken by Surprise.” His most recent projects include documenting an important form of dance/theater improvisation in his feature-length film A Moving Presence: Ruth Zaporah and Action Theater (available through Contact Quarterly), and his new book Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation, based on interviews with eight American masters of improvisation. Most recently he was teaching and performing in Mexico (a new collaboration with British improviser Sally Doughty) and the Netherlands, and was in residence teaching movement and theater improvisation in San Juan on a National Performance Network/La Red funded grant to the Consejo Artistico de Puerto Rico.
