Thomas Bradley on Working with our Pre-Professional Year

Our 2015 Pre-Professional Year recently spent a two week intensive with former Sydney Dance Company dancer Thomas Bradley. Here, Thomas recaps on his improvisation process that he passed on to students:

During my time with the Pre-Professional Year students, I was interested in developing a lengthy, guided improvisation whose purpose would be to act as a filter. With my own improvisational constructs, and severe influences from recent Gaga and Japanese Noh Theatre intensives, I set out to design a sieve through which dancers pass with their own history and understanding of movement potential and capability. When the process is complete, the dancers are gifted with tools for movement generation, a level of fatigue that is paramount to movement authenticity and a greater connection and awareness of each other and their environment.

In the beginning, we connect two structures: our own structure (body) and the external structure (context). There’s a humility and respect that comes when you compare the structures, especially when you release authority of movement to the external structure. We spoke of ropes and our own hair connecting body to context, which eventually became our map.

As a young creator, I want to continue exploring my own physicality, which is why I engage in this process with the dancers; we converge in states of exhaustion, suspension, apology and defeat, arriving at a communal understanding of the qualities and aesthetics I’m interested in designing.

– Thomas Bradley

Click here to register your interest in our 2016 Pre-Professional Year.