Draft:European Dance Development Center

The European Dance Development Center (EDDC) was a highly influential, avant-garde contemporary dance and choreography institution. Founded in 1990 in Arnhem, Netherlands, by Aat Hougée(1945-2021) and Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson(1946-2020). It operated as a radical alternative to conventional dance academies before eventually being integrated into ArtEZ University of the Arts in 2002.

The EDDC, originally the Center for New Dance Development, was founded as a progressive offshoot of Amsterdam's School for New Dance Development (SNDO). Its founders wanted to escape closed, rigid academic systems and foster a highly open, experimental, and performative environment.

The curriculum purposefully omitted classical ballet or rigid modern techniques like Cunningham. Instead, daily training focused on somatic practices, exploration, and improvisation.

The school brought in an international rotation of pioneering guest choreographers and performance artists to lead intensive, process-based workshops alongside a small permanent faculty.

Core Methodologies the school offered included Release technique, Contact Improvisation, somatic practices such as Body-Mind Centering (BMC) and the Alexander Technique with a focus toward choreographic approaches to performance making.

"Working initially with Pauline de Groot and later also with Jaap Flier in Amsterdam, and with Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson and Lisa Kraus in Arnhem, Aat was instrumental in setting up and running experimental dance departments that were hotbeds of inquiry and exploration. His vision went beyond the confines of institutionalism. He bent rules in ways that made it possible for students to study in unconventional ways from artist/teachers who taught the passions they were exploring at that very moment. The studio was sacrosanct. Unlike the more usual institutional protocol of fitting subjects and students into existing curricula, Aat championed the principle that subjects taught always revolved around current interests of working practitioners. Ideas were constantly in development; there was a constant stream of showings of work-in-progress and performances - in studios, in theaters, in corridors and odd indoor spaces, in various and varied outdoor spaces. The atmosphere hummed with creative drive 24/7 - students had access to the building day and night.

Aat was more than an administrator. He had a keen eye for the most innovative and indomitable dance and performance artists, musician/composers, designers, video artists, thinkers ... whoever he could find working within the post Judson idiom. Invitations to teach provided income that saw many of the artists, who were predominantly freelancers, through lean times.

This was a time when wild joy ensued if unpredictability was in the air. Aat embraced this spirit of improvisational mind in the structures he created. It was during the early years of EDDC, inspired by Mary and her experiences at Dartington College (UK), and Lisa and a number of resident and guest teachers, (including Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Richard Kerry), who had taught and/or studied at Bennington College (VT, USA), that this was stretched most expansively. The school year was run as a series of workshops lasting from 2 to 6 weeks; 2-hour morning Awareness Classes took the place of traditional technique classes; students were actively encouraged to create work and perform; the curriculum was incessantly tweaked and re-tweaked to adjust to the needs of students and teachers. All this, of course, held difficulties as well as delights - we were all learning along the way." from Aat Hougée's obituary from ArtEZ.nl on FB

The school produced a generation of influential international dancers, choreographers, and arts educators who shaped contemporary European performance networks.

Fulltime faculty: Mary Fulkerson, Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus, Tony Thatcher, Richard Kerry, Nol Tilanus

Guest faculty (incomplete list): Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Ellen Barlow, Sarah Skaggs, Sally Silvers, Jennifer Lacey, Clarinda MacLow, Stephanie Skura, Yoshiko Chuma, K.J. Holmes, Randy Warsaw, Karen Nelson, Mimi Goese, Jim Fulkerson, Ishmael Houston Jones, Jerry Hunter Nancy Stark Smith, Meg Stuart, Christine Svane, Diane Torr, Carmelita Tropicana, Benoit Lachambre, Simone Forti, Yvonne Meier, Jennifer Monson, Mary Overlie, Frans Poelstra, Lee Saunders, Daniel Lepkoff, Fast Forward

Graduates (incomplete list): Peter Pleyer, Eszter Gal, Olive Bieringa, Karen Schaffman, Lydia Mueller, Nadia Cusimano, Silke Z., Gyula Berger, Amélia Bentes, Hana Tefrati, Jaime Llopis

[1] [2]

  1. ^ https://chronos.exeter.ac.uk/cdf/media_public/catalogue.php?type=132&view=n
  2. ^ https://touchingmargins.com/Peter

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