Anouk van dijk biography samples

Her interest in site-specific work has taken her dnacers from the Ship Yards in Amsterdam to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Central to the foundation of Anouk van Dijk's artistic work and the training of her dancers has been Countertechnique, the movement system she developed to provide dancers with applied tools for versatile dance practice in the 21st century.

Countertechnique helps dancers in training, rehearsal and performance - focusing on the process of incorporating information into action. The principles of Countertechnique can also be applied to other dance forms and training methods, such as ballet, hiphop, partnering, Yoga, running and Pilates. That was my first insight into the concept that two things could be moving away from each other to create stability.

In the years to follow, I began building on this idea, exploring it in my own movement and body. There was a lot of trial and error, but slowly I started to see the logic. How did the technique develop into the teaching method it is today? After six years or so, my personal research had developed into a codified training method, preparing dancers for my movement material.

At that time, my company began to receive multiple-year funding, allowing me to build an ensemble of dancers. This is when the more in-depth exploration of the movement system really started. Nina Wollny joined my company straight out of school inand worked with Countertechnique from day one. She started teaching Countertechnique in and her contribution to the development of the system has been enormous.

In the following years my other dancers also started teaching, all very organically. When Codarts University in Rotterdam asked us in to implement a four year Countertechnique course in their curriculum, I realised it was time for a formal teacher training. Besides my own dancers, we also had two participants who had never been part of the company.

When they were able to successfully complete the teacher training, we realised the methodology had developed beyond the shared physical language of our dancers ensemble. It was exhilarating! Countertechnique had developed into an autonomous movement system. Who have been particularly important figures during your career? Another key figure was Alexander Teacher Tom Koch, who helped me build a refined awareness of how my mind and body were interconnected.

Insights like these stimulated me to explore the thoughts and principles that eventually led to Countertechnique. What is the fundamental difference of the Countertechnique teaching approach? Lastly, Countertechnique uses a formalised class structure without working with a preconceived idea of what something should look like. Instead it offers information that can be applied to the process of dancing itself — a much more useful approach than constantly having to stress about the end result.

This information is organised in the Countertechnique Toolbox, a virtual knowledge bank from which dancers can pick the tools they want to work with.

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It is crucial, therefore, that dancers first experience the principles in class, as you cannot start studying Countertechnique from a book. I was in every piece, doing a lot of dancing. The mentality of the company was: Do it all by will power. And since I am physically a very strong person, I would get injured because of over—powering, putting too much strain and power on my muscles when I was tired.

In that difficult time, I first heard about Alexander Technique.

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In I started Alexander Technique lessons with Tom Koch and I can say from the heart that without him, I would not be dancing still—I would have destroyed my body. 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. I remember the piece I was in, the section, the music, the movement, when I realized that what I was thinking was really working.

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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. By the end of the piece I was not nearly as exhausted as I usually was. Why did you develop your own technique?

I started choreographing almost the same time I started to dance professionally. In the beginning I choreographed on my fellow dancers. 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.

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.

And I realized that whether I was thinking from my fingertips, my whole arm, or from a joint, the outcome was always the same: Two things are moving away from each other. Then I started to work with that principle. None of these thoughts, taken by themselves, are completely new. When I explain about the kinetic logic of the weight going outside the central axis, and that by sending something else the other direction you can stabilize yourself, it is a physical law.

This is nothing new.

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But to put these different elements together and use it in dancing is definitely a new approach. And because the process to accomplish this takes time, it has become a technique that you need to study in order to master it. Technique is something that gives you tools, offers you possibilities. The assumption seems to be that technique can only restrict.

But technique is something different than kicking your leg up high or holding a shape, so people need to rethink what technique is. Technique encompasses different skills one can learn; these skills will add up to the knowledge of your body, of yourself, and the choices that you make—and will provide you with a range of physical and mental possibilities.

So technique is much more than just the aesthetic outcome. What is your goal with Countertechnique? Countertechnique stems from an interest in helping dancers to have a less strenuous daily practice. It is a really hard profession, and we have a lot of things that work against us. The aim in Countertechnique is to give dancers tools to make it lighter, to make standing on your legs, bending your legs, bending forwards, falling, jumping, and so on, easier.

Equally important is to make dancers feel less negative about themselves, to trust themselves, and have them be less judgmental on how they are progressing. How do you communicate that as a teacher? A Countertechnique teacher needs to be interested in the process of helping dancers and have compassion for the fact that when a dancer makes mistakes, it is rarely because of laziness or disinterest but mostly because of misunderstandings or fear.

The aim is to get a wider range in our movements, a bigger capacity in our bodies. Do you follow a strict concept in class?