Zornitsa Stoyanova teaches Dance Improvisation workshops, Dance Composition classes, and Digital Dance intensives and has done so in the U.S., Europe, and now online to students from all over the world.
She has been a mentor to numerous young and mid-career performance makers and choreographers both on an individual basis and as part of residencies and emergent artist programs. Her extensive experience in dance, choreography, stage production, and DIY style of making a life as an artist, makes her a unique artistic mentor, who understands what it takes to produce a performance or film as an independent and low/unfunded artist. She supports others in making choreographic work for stage or film as well as mentoring in promoting, lighting, and costume design. As a creator of multiple local and international choreographic residency programs and a mother of two, she has a particular ability to understand life circumstances and offer support and simple tools for moving forward.
In the dance studio, she merges many different influences in her classes most often using approaches borrowed from Emergent Improvisation, her studies with Deborah Hay and Meg Stuart.
All her classes, including the more technical digital dance class, are focused on performance technique engulfing the presence of the dancer and an intimate understanding of the performance space, the audience, and the self. She focuses on creating a bridge between the composing and emotional body and works on translating all the tools she’s developed over the twenty-plus years to her students.
Zornitsa is always open to more teaching and mentoring in every form. She offers one on one artistic mentoring to choreographers and artists all around the world on a sliding scale hourly rate. If you are interested in working with her in that capacity, please contact her at zornitsa(at)bodymeld.org
Upcoming workshops or mentorship programs you can find here.
Zornitsa Stoyanova has expertise in:
Improvisation Dance and Composition:
- working with the sensorium into creating movement
- Emergent solos, duets, and group work
- compositional improvisation for the group
- improvising with sound
- composing in the space
- deconstructing the body – creating creatures
- working with gesture and posture
- working with emergent language
- working compositionally with digital media
- live feed special effects
- working compositionally and improvisationally with light
Performer Maker Self (sample 3 or one-day options workshop) – This workshop touches on the basic modalities of improvisation—exploring space, time, solos, and pairings, moving from impulse vs. moving from memory or imagination.
We will approach these techniques with new eyes and break down step by step the ways we create and shape the space. This is a technique in letting our composition mind move in parallel to our improvisation mind – tracking sensation, the self, and the group into creating performance.
This workshop is catered towards dancers new to improvisation or seasoned improvisers, who would like to check in and learn a different style of improvisation.
Day 1 – one session – We will discuss space and how to compose it. Using the different ways we can see and perceive, we will do group scores in composing the space. We will borrow techniques from Simone Forti.
Day 2 – two sessions – First session we will focus on creating ensemble scores into duets using exercises based on Emergent Improvisation. Second session we will explore different ways of approaching duets using techniques proposed by Meg Stuart. We will ask the question of what is emergent, how to move seamlessly between the roles of leader, responder of framer. We will spend a lot of time on the role of the framer, delving deeper into the meaning of shaping and composing the space and the events during improvisation.
Day 3 – two sessions – Both sessions we will work in performing solos and particularly on performing presence and Deborah Hay’s approach of Ready Fire Aim. We will interrogate the self and our ability to bring different states, feelings and presences on the surface during a performance. We will finish with Performing Solo Improvisation without a score. If you are interested in this work, highly recommend you come for the full day or just the first session as it would be confusing to join at the end.
Dance on Camera / Understanding the Digital Frame / Digital Dance
offering this workshop with the focus on mobile and web cam media, live feed special effects as well as broadcasting dance.
This is a workshop specifically for dance-makers interested in producing screendance. The workshop can be divided into 5 or 6 small (2-hour sessions) or be a comprehensive 1 to 3 days intensive with hands-on work and feedback sessions.
During the classes, we learn the major difference between dancing live vs. dancing inside the digital frame. Zornitsa Stoyanova will share tips and tricks on making the best-looking videos using your phone camera she’s developed since 2007. Students will learn how space and perspective change on the digital canvas and shoot movement both with stationary and moving cameras.
In the afternoon we will focus on scouting physical space for shooting, lighting, and story-boarding.
If time allows we will experiment with animations, in-camera editing as well as post-production editing.