CURRICULUM
Suzanne COTTO, choreograph and manual therapist is involved in an improvisation state of mind mixing a serious and deep body work with poetic and delirious creations.
Process : combining the subtle body mechanism with the thrilling joy of improvisation
She makes non-identified objects.
She works with jazz and electro-acoustic musicians : Philippe Sellam, Michèle Buirette, “Drame Musical Instantanné”, Gérard Siracugsa, Christine Moreau. She has always been keen on all types of dance : classical dance, jazz dance, tap dancing, contemporaneous dance, yoga, Taï Chi, with people like Joseph Rusillo, Christiane de Rougemont, Hideyuki Yano, Elsa Wolliaston, Harry Sheppard, Kar Fung Santaro, Patricia Bardi. She practises singing with Annick Nozati; she attends an unforgettable training session with John Cage. She discovers Contact Improvisation dance in 1978 with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson. With other adventurers, she creates the Contact Improvisation Dance Association : invitation of foreign dancers, jams, dance lessons, European exchanges. With Howard Sovenklar, she organizes a European meeting in Angers’s CNDC. She teaches this technique until 1991. She works on how the body reacts within the space between the real and imaginary world in the Movement and Fantasy Laboratory/1991 that becomes the Body Brain Storming/2009, and opens on the “Trigger Concept”and the “Physical Sculpture”.
The Trigger Concept/2002
THE TRIGGER is the feeling of the “right time” when, like in Alice’s in wonderland, we change worlds. We reach an area where the only thing you have to do is to follow and no longer “to find one’s way”. The story builds itself up and asks us to be wise enough to follow it. Then, more or less easy but rather joyful fittings follow between the fountain of ideas and the other dancers : their triggers, their personalities, and their tracksuits … our unusual deliriums and so on and so forth.
OSTEOCINESY®
The Physical Sculpture
Qualified in physiotherapy out of necessity, but being stuck by a lumbago preventing her from dancing, since 1976 she has been searching how to dance despite everything (only very few solutions existed at that time and the only advice doctors could find was to forbid dancers to dance.) She turns towards improvisation as the only accessible space. In 1978 Contact Improvisation Dance enables her to open again a new field of concrete exploration. She revolves around this avant-garde International Movement of information on the subtle networks of the body (Body Mind Centering …). She studies oestheopathia , an interesting technique though she feels it isn’t quite satisfying to solve the dancers’ problems. After practising it for 20 years, she works out her own physical harmonisation technique.