Anouk van dijk biography of michael

In Countertechnique, this conscious shift of focus has become a very important facet. What happened after you graduated? I just felt I needed more knowledge. I was in every piece, doing a lot of dancing. The mentality of the company was: Do it all by will power. In that difficult time, I first heard about Alexander Technique. And I think a lot of dancers who have to stop by the time they are thirty-three or thirty-four have to do so because they never learned to dose the power and flexibility they have in their bodies.

What changed in your dancing? It took me much longer to find out what was helpful from Alexander Technique than I had anticipated. Only when I gave up trying did it suddenly click for me. And suddenly it worked. While I continued moving, I doubted I could still have this Alexander—directing going on in my head while I was moving full—out. I was afraid I would start to mark.

But I found that I could actually move with less energy. Why did you develop your own technique? I started choreographing almost the same time I started to dance professionally. Soon my work became too specific for them and I realized that if I wanted this specific quality, I would have to help them to find it. In my early classes I made my first attempts to analyze what I was doing and how to teach this.

Anouk van dijk biography of michael

The other dancers were always taking ballet in the morning, but that was not very helpful for my body. So one day I started to develop my own class, to find a format that would keep me in shape while I was on tour. I started by thinking about which exercises, from all I had learned over the years, were good for my body. The next question was: Why is this exercise working so well for me?

And then: Why is it working this way, but not when I approach it that way? I started to basically analyze everything I had learned until then and very soon I found I was doing something essentially different from other teachers. What did you find? They were simply dance steps, but with a different coordination and speed. With that in mind, I started to reflect more consciously on my own classes.

Then I started to work with that principle. None of these thoughts, taken by themselves, are completely new. By Madeline Harms. Tell me a little about how it all began, what inspired you to pursue an artistic career? I grew up in a small town in the east of The Netherlands, and it was here I started with tap, jazz and modern dance classes as a teenager.

When I was 15, I saw a professional dancer perform a solo, up close in the studio. I felt immediately drawn to this freedom of energy and other level of how one could exist. This event had an enormous impact on me, and was my inspiration to pursue dance. How did you find the transition into the professional life? I was lucky because the artistic director of the local dance company came to my university and somehow picked me.

Nowadays, the range of employment opportunities is bigger, and the artistic diversity much greater. The flip side of it is that most dancers have to combine very different artistic practices in their career, often simultaneously. Countertechnique was developed with the diversity of contemporary practice in mind. It aims to empower dancers by giving them tools they can apply in any given situation.

You have had quite a diverse performance career, could you give me snippet of it? In the late eighties, repertory companies for contemporary dance became popular in the Netherlands. From , I only performed in my own work. Is there a particular obstacle in your career that you would like to share? It was very tough to break patterns of the stereotype I had inadvertently created for myself as a dancer.

I was very fast and had massive endurance, therefore I was always used as the power gun. If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. Forgot your password? Retrieve it. Anouk van Dijk Person — 10 Views. Who is Anouk van Dijk? We need you!

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