About the workshop
Kurdi’s engaging, lively workshops are focused on motion, voice and theatrical techniques with an emphasis on freedom of movement, spontaneity, meditative improvisation and the relationship between body and voice. She encourages participants to free their voices with wordless song and phonemes and builds interdependence between sound and movement through exercises built on trust, listening and slow, concentrated, ‘soul’-generated theatrics.
Required
No previous experience in sound art, dance, or theater is required – the workshop is open to all.
About the instructor
Muyassar Kurdi is a musician, performance artist, dancer, filmmaker and educator from Chicago, Illinois, and currently living in NYC.
In performance, she explores the relationship between abstract sound and metaprimordial movement, obliquely confronting ideas of masculine subjugation by reappropriating and then distorting hegemonically sexualised figurative motion and juxtaposing it with random, abrasive and jarring acoustic and electronic sound components along with wordless vocalisations.
A joyfully self-exorcising ritualist, Kurdi studied voice and dance with legendary vocalist, dancer and ECM recording artist Meredith Monk via The House Foundation for the Arts as well as learning Japanese dance tradition Butoh with Tadashi Endo, director of the Butoh Center MAMU and Butoh Festivals in Germany, and Mexican master of the form Diego Piñon.