workshops

An artist and teacher, Susan Douglas Roberts values opportunities to engage with those who are curious about life and the ways in which they filter life lived into art making. She is drawn to those who understand their bodies as habitable, communicative and healable space, inextricably linked to being in the moment at hand and those who are – or will be – in the moment too. Susan is a keen believer that workshop experience is richer for shared learning.

pilates

Susan is a passionate and long-term practitioner/investigator of the Pilates work – as centering practice, as somatic practice, as healing practice, and as a way to stay fit, healthy, and mobile. She is certified through the National Pilates Certification Program as NCPT and part of the team of instructors that teach and administer the Pilates Teacher Training Program at TCU. She will design workshops and/or sessions specific to dancers in training, or for any organization or individual interested in the Pilates practice.

performance training

Susan works with dancers around the world to create physically informed, instinctual choices in motion. She moves dancers toward bone-deep, functionally driven dancing with a focus on multi-potentiality, detail and sensory experience. Her mentoring style honors western concert classicism, and encourages those with whom she works to balance abandon with embodied clarity. Her ultimate goal is this: to offer training in dance technique and artistry such that those with whom she works are prepared to perform and/or choreograph in a breadth of contemporary idioms.

dancemaking

Susan’s work is grounded in exploration that leads to intentional craft. She understands that imagination and the ability to act on it – to idear (Spanish: devise; essentially, activate an idea) – is the realm and responsibility of the individual, supported in community. As a facilitator, she shares the practice of seeing, connecting, constructing and developing choreographic material for performance. Particularly interested in pointing choreographers toward the space where lived experience and spontaneity meet – where artistic alchemy takes place – her workshops focus on skill building techniques that translate to a variety of dancemaking situations – ways of moving beyond the formulaic and into fully invested, cohesive choreographic ideas.