Somatic Movement and Dance Improvisation Classes

Name: Somatic Movement and Dance Improvisation Classes
Start: 2025-08-30T06:00:00+12:00
End: 2025-08-30T08:00:00+12:00
Location: Knox Church, Dunedin

Schedule

Sat Aug 30 2025 at 06:00 am to 08:00 am

UTC+12:00

Location

Knox Church, Dunedin | Dunedin, OT

Oliver Connew is offering a series of 10 weekly somatic movement and dance improvisation classes here in Ōtepoti!
These classes are grounded in Oliver’s interests as an artist and dancer, exploring the body as a diffuse, porous, and entangled entity. The first half of each two-hour class will guide participants through movement explorations in embodied anatomy, focusing especially on cellular awareness, the senses and perception, breath, and relationships to gravity. This deepened awareness of the bodymind’s relational infrastructures then carries into the second half of the class, a structured collective improvisational practice where participants can sense, feel and be together in dance and movement.
These classes are intended for dancers, movers, performers, body-based practitioners, and other working artists with a strong interest in dance and movement.
No commitment to attend all 10 classes is required, but participants are asked to express their intention to attend by emailing Oliver (see below). If you wish, include a couple of sentences about yourself and your interests in this work to help him plan and shape the sessions.
📆 WHEN Saturday 4-6pm - weekly for 10 sessions (except 26 July, 16 Aug and 13 Sept). Classes commence 12th July
📍WHERE Stuart Hall, Knox Church, 449 George St, Central Dunedin
💰COST Thanks to Dunedin City Council Creative Communities funding these classes are FREE to attend (koha welcomed).
🎟️ TO REGISTER Please express your intention to attend (keen! 🙋😁)by emailing Oliver [email protected].
ABOUT OLIVER
Oliver Connew is a choreographer, dancer and occasional writer, among other things. In the studio and on stage he explores dance, somatic practices and choreographic strategies that form and deform the body as an ecological entity. His work is interested in a diffuse and porous body which exceeds its own bounds and that destabilises perceptions of me, you and this other thing. He sees art making and performing as forms of magic that maintain a power to shift what is possible to be and become.
Oliver is a classical ballet graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance, and has a contemporary dance degree from Unitec Auckland. For over a decade he worked as a dancer and performer in Europe with Peter Pleyer, Body Cartography, Wilhelm Groener, Joshua Rutter and July Weber among others, and is a member of the Berlin-based dance ensemble “Cranky Bodies a/company”. In 2021 he completed the Master Exerce programme in choreographic research at the Centre Chorégraphique National Montpellier, France. Alongside his choreographic and dance work, Oliver is a trained Somatic Movement Educator with Body-Mind Centering®.
www.oliverconnew.com