Hugh is a Contemporary Dance Artist specialising in Contact Improvisation. He has over 15 years of teaching & performance experience. He began dancing when he was 15, training in Break dance and Contemporary. He went on to train at Northern School of Contemporary Dance (NSCD), graduating in 2008. Since then he has worked with companies such as 2Faced Dance, Tom Dale, STAN Won’t Dance, and most recently Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez.
He has taught intensives internationally at the Goa Contact Festival (2015-16-18-19-20), Goa Dance residency(2019-20), Thailand Contact and ecstatic arts festival(2019), Berlin contact festival (2014-19) and Portugal Contact gathering(2018-19), and for National Dance company Wales (NDCW) as well as organising his own workshops and retreats in the UK, Portugal, Germany, Israel and India.
Presently, what interests Hugh most about teaching and facilitating movement is how to create and hold spaces for other people to find a deeper connection to themselves through playful exploration. Whether it is improvisation, contact Improvisation, or a choreographed dance class, the focus and intention lies in finding the joy and power of a movement practice connected to presence, awareness and breath.
INTENSIVE together with Vega Luukkonen 26. -29 April 2025
Home in the body
What does home mean to you?
How do we create a sense of home within ourselves?
Throughout this module we weave together Somatics, Contact Improvisation & presence practices to invite ourselves to feel deeply at home in the body and in movement. Studying C.I. technique & explorations – tools and exercises to find your dance & tuning to move together with other bodies.
Giving space to presence practices – meditative principles and opening perception exercises – to bring more awareness to our interconnected whole as we move together. Home brings a sense of safety. When we feel safe, we have space and capacity to explore and to connect to others. From this place real integrative learning can happen.
We will also focus on taking the time to delve into what is most present for the group at the time. In this way we wish to hold a space that serves the wishes and needs that arise and move fluidly with the journey, and find home within ourselves and our dance.
Throughout this journey we will offer explorative exercises, as well as clear technical tools and pathways to understand underlying physical principles of contact improvisation. We’ll spend time with the floor, sensing gravity, studying how our bodies function.
What makes our movement effortless and efficient ?
How do we align our bones to create support and ease in our movement ?
Becoming comfortable with not knowing. Working with ideas and images of softness & liquidity, and how developing multidirectional availability opens more possibilities in our movement. Sharing weight and finding the subtle details and articulation of our shared architectures, that brings us into moving together through levels, through the space & in and out of contact. Using our breath in finding synchronicity helps us to ‘tune’ together.
We will flow in and out of contact, viewing the dance as a playful dialogue, which breathes freely in time and space. Composing the dance, composing the contact. Material alternates between contact- and solo tasks, towards trios and group-scores.
Photographer: Ken Buslay
