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Register 2024

Thomas Bradley

Thomas Bradley

Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company

IMPROVISED CHOREOGRAPHY

Sessions will focus on developing individual strategies of movement improvisation according to sensation, attention, text and musicality. Participants will draw from practices of Japanese butoh, qi gong, clowning and improvisation methods of Ioannis Mandafounis (DFDC) and Cyril Baldy, using both physical and imaginative tools to provoke the body.

These modes will be practiced in a group context to develop collective, choreographic thinking and responsibility.

Born in Cootamundra, Australia, Bradley is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily as a dancer and costume designer. He is currently contracted with Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company. From 2017-23 he worked with Emanuel Gat Dance (FR), prior to that he spent several years with Sydney Dance Company and Australian Dance Theatre. In 2015, he was shortlisted for Outstanding Male Dancer at the Australian Dance Awards. He also received a scholarship from the Tanja Liedtke Foundation.

His costume design work has been commissioned by Staatsballet Berlin, Scottish Dance Theatre, Emanuel Gat Dance, and exhibited in Venice, Hamburg and Madrid. Bradley’s movement practice is largely influenced by Japanese Butoh and improvisation. He studied butoh under Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoka of Dance Medium, and Yoshito Ohno. This training lead to the creation of his ongoing performance series CHARACTERS which has been performed in the Louvre Paris, Butohpolis International Butoh Art Festival, Warsaw and Castel Sant Angelo, Rome as part of Fuori Programma 2023.

His improvisation practice text, movement, object has emerged from encounters with Live Choreography (Ioannis Mandafounis), clowning (Lecoq), Sentient Method (Cyril Baldy), Japanese butoh and reading of Carl Jung’s archetypes.

He is also a writer publishing as Thomas A. Bradley, and music producer under the pseudonym David Jones.

He is a founding member of the performance collective LANDBREAKERS.