Mindfulness in Creative Practice

Master teacher and choreographer David Brick explores the crossroads of mindfulness and creative practice in this experimental workshop.  

David Brick, co-founder of the Bessie Award-winning Headlong, and co-director of Pig Iron’s Love Unpunished, teaches a unique approach to physical improvisation, presence, and composition.  With his longtime collaborators at Headlong and with his partner Maiko Matsushima, he has trained ensembles of performers and makers and created remarkable performance installations and works of dance theater. 

Pulling together 3 decades of research on walking meditation, the choreographic language of Deborah Hay, the architectural practice of Tadao Andao, and improvisational movement, David’s teaching has impacted a generation of makers here in Philadelphia, at Headlong and Pig Iron, and at the Yard in Massachusetts.

While David has incorporated mindfulness practices into his choreography and composition for decades, this workshop represents a kind of beta-test of a new framing of this meditative/sensory/movement modality.  David will share a selection of choreographic and improvisational training techniques along with complementary meditative and therapeutic exercises.  Participants will explore and discuss this landscape of meditative and creative practice as, together with David, they seek to define an emerging practice that brings together mindfulness and the creative act.

About David Brick

David Brick is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Headlong Dance Theater, a platform for performance research and grassroots artist support. He directs the Headlong Performance Institute residency and training program. David collaborates broadly in making dance, performance of all kinds, and participatory installations. His multifaceted experience living inside and outside of Deaf culture shapes their teachings on creativity and contemplation, cultivating fluid presence and wild physical intelligence, and practices of empathy as the basis for creative processes built on insight and transformation. 

Collaborators include Ishmael Houston Jones, Eiko Otake, Rosie Herrera, Dan Rothenberg, Maiko Matsushima, Hari Krishnan, Mimi Lien, Jungwoong Kim and Larissa Velez-Jackson. Headlong’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, numerous NEA grants, and the MAP fund. David has been honored with a Bessie, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Japan-US Friendship Commission fellowship. His large-scale public art project The Quiet Circus (www.thequietcircus.com) - a collaboration with curator Mary Jane Jacob and visual designer Maiko Matsushima - was a weekly public performance that took place on urban river sites throughout Philadelphia over the course of a year and a half. His writings about art practice as a form of thinking and experience can be found on The Quiet Circus Blog. www.headlong.org / www.thequietcircus.com/blog