Dance strengthens your self-confidence, self-expression, self-knowledge and health. At ICK Academy, we focus on the personal physical experience in order to achieve movement and dance.

Our cultural education programme has two starting points:

• Everyone can dance.
• The physical experience – of the curious, individual body – is central.

ICK Academy has a rich experience in educational projects for and with children, young people and dance students. For primary and secondary education, we have the Young projects. In these, we give ICK’s creations a new, individual interpretation. This opportunity creates educational youth performances such as Roccito and Young Macbeth, in which students share the stage with our the dancers of ICK. In the coming years, we will expand the learning goals and develop new Young projects.

We are always finding ways to transform the workshop Double Skin/Double Mind into a workable, stimulating system for educational purposes. The workshop is given at colleges, academies as well as in primary and secondary education. It teaches children, adolescents and students more about the intuitive body that is at the basis of all our decisions. In the workshop we learn to recognize and trust this feeling. The workshop was also incorporated into tangible teaching material, the Sensorium Toolkit, which can be used by dance teachers.

The toolkit is an instrument for dance teachers to stimulate pupils to dance and create movement through sensory experience. This physical box stimulates creativity and is full of tools to feel, hear, look and smell

The Sensorium Toolkit gives teachers guidance during lessons in which the connection between body and mind is paramount. Images, sounds, smells and textures form the starting point for physical discovery and for the natural process of concentration, information processing, creative association, imagination and ultimately layered movement.

The Sensorium Toolkit is inspired by the artistic vision of the professional choreography practice of Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten. The toolkit gives you, as a teacher, material with which you encourage students to discover the creative possibilities of their bodies. The toolkit does not prescribe movements or choreographies. It was Greco’s curiosity for the moving body that drove him into the studio himself in 1995. With the toolkit we evoke that same curiosity in both pupils and teachers.

A teacher who works with the toolkit is particularly eager to expand his/her own creative vision, to go off the beaten track of kinetic movement lessons and to embark on adventures in learning to discover the relationship between body and mind.

The toolkit is suitable for various teaching situations and is intended for lessons for pupils aged 8 years and older. As a teacher, you decide whether you use the toolkit in one lesson, in a series of lessons, or as a recurring part of your regular lessons. The toolkit combines the creative with the rational and thus offers a multifaceted view of what dance education is: learning about yourself, your own body and the relationship with your environment through creativity and discovery, analysis and processing.

For more information please contact: SuzanTunca@ickamsterdam.nl