AVLYST: Contemporary med Sarah Foster-Sproull (NZ)

Sarah is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland – Dance Studies programme with a research focus on choreography, creative practice, and contemporary dance technique. Her contemporary dance classes are popular with professional dancers and dance students due to the pace, selection of energised music, collegiality, release technique focus, and incorporation of improvisation to unlock technical fundamentals. In her technique class, Sarah will lead you through a range of articulate movement phrases, utilising analogy, humour, improvisation, and a relaxed friendly approach to help embody the dance material.

Her teaching practice is inclusive, person-centred, and creative. This class draws from movement principles of fall and release, precision, clarity of line, and connecting to the joy of moving for the self and with others. The class start by a led improvised warm-up engaging with an interplay of group and individual awareness, then mooves into structured sequences of movement that connects to choreographic principles evident within her dance making practice.

Om Sarah Foster-Sproull

Sarah Foster-Sproull is an acclaimed choreographer and dancer working in New Zealand and internationally. She is the Artistic Director of Foster Group Dance, the Choreographer in Residence at the Royal New Zealand Ballet and was Creative New Zealand’s Choreographic Fellow for 2017-2019. Sarah has choreographic relationships with Footnote New Zealand Dance, Tamsyn Russell and Dance Base (Edinburgh), Guangdong Modern Dance Company (China), T.H.E. (Singapore), and VOU (Fiji). Her choreographic research traverses large scale works for up to 100 performers, to intimate performances involving one or two dancers. Sarah was 2019’s Director of Choreography at The World of Wearable Art, New Zealand’s largest performance event. To date, her choreographic work has been performed in New Zealand, Singapore, China, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and Fiji.