Workshop: Abby Zbikowski
- Date:
- Sat 9 Mar 2024
- Time:
- 13:00 - 15:30
- Venue:
- DanceHouse, Studio 4
- Admission:
- €5, Book via Mindbody
Join renowned American choreographer Abby Zbikowski for a workshop at Dance Ireland on Saturday 9 March!
Irish Modern Dance Theatre (IMDT) and Dance Ireland are pleased to invite you to take part in a workshop with American choreographer Abby Zbikowski, who will be working on a new commissioned work with IMDT. Abby is keen to use this opportunity to meet dancers of all backgrounds and disciplines that currently call Ireland home.
Abby works across different dance genres and her style is fast and athletic. Abby Zbikowski’s dancers have come from come from backgrounds as varied as street dance, modern and postmodern dance, hip-hop, contemporary African forms and tap along with synchronized swimming, soccer and martial arts.
This workshop is particularly suited for dancers with a background and skills in streetdance, African dance genres and physical contemporary styles and will be at an advanced physical level. During the workshop Abby will teach some of her repertoire and share her collaborative and creative techniques. This a wonderful opportunity to encounter new techniques and make career connections.
Book in below!
See Abby’s work here
Abandoned Playground: https://youtu.be/wiw6NtDY9dE
And
Performance teaser: https://youtu.be/9qEyzB64iDI
Press Reviews
“in ‘radioactive practice,’ Abby Zbikowski showed the distinct way that she views dance. It’s highly physical and sweat-inducing, but it also reveals something about what happens when an athletic act becomes a spiritual one. At New York Live Arts, her performers, fluent in many styles from postmodern dance and hip-hop to synchronized swimming and martial arts, took center stage for dancing that spoke about a body’s history, its conditioning. The music was blissfully loud.” —Gia Kourlas, NY Times
New York Times Review: abandoned playground: The Punishing Place where Dance meets Sport
New York Times: Best Dance Performances 2022
About Abby Zbikowski
Choreographer Abby Zbikowski created Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with dancers to experiment with the potential and choreographic possibility of the body being pushed beyond perceived limits, creating a new movement lexicon that triangulates dancing/moving bodies across multiple cultural value systems simultaneously.
Her piece “abandoned playground” premiered to a sold-out run at the Abrons Arts Center in New York in April 2017, leading to Zbikowski being honoured with the Juried Bessie Award and was awarded the inaugural Caroline Hearst Artist in Residence at Princeton University, along with commissions from national and international organisations. Abby Z and the New Utility have been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Boston ICA, 92nd St Y, Movement Research at Danspace Project, Gibney Dance Center, Bard College, New York Live Arts, and the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, among others.
In 2021 the company was granted residency support at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH to rebuild work post a year-long pandemic shutdown. Currently, they are working out of Columbus and New York City with collaborators locally, nationally, and internationally.
Book here: