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Dance Behind The Screen


Nov 27, 2019

On this episode your co-hosts YeaJean and Reyna interview artists, teachers, performers, and attendees at the annual Texas Dance Improvisation Festival (TDIF). Initially conceived of by Jordan Fuchs with the mission to share, inspire and challenge the improvisational dance community of Texas, TDIF was first co-hosted at TWU in 2009 by Fuchs and Sarah Gamblin. Since that first year TDIF has grown to include over 200 participants a year, including students, professors and professional dance artists from across Texas, the United States and as far away as Germany and Taiwan. Relying on a Coordinating Committee of university faculty and professional dance artists to produce the annual weekend festival, TDIF is hosted by a different Texas university each year. Through a lean organizational structure and the leveraging of university resources for the benefit of the wider university and improvisational dance communities, TDIF emphasizes financial accessibility, with participant registration fees for the three-day festival minimized as much as possible, and only recently raised to $20 total. On this episode, we go behind the screen of TDIF facilitating a roundtable discussion with Blake Nellis, Chrissy Nelson, and Lily Sloan of Big Rig Dance Collective. We uncover their varied career paths and relationship to dance and improvisation. We discuss and define improvisation in relation to  processes, practice, and transferable skills. We share conversations on how the current issues of consent in relation to the #metoo movement affect the culture of improvisation. We unpack the evolution and offerings of TDIF. 

Detailed showkNOwtes: https://www.knowboxdance.com/post/20-tdif2019