Bates Dance Festival’s 11th annual winter intensive in New York City is in partnership with Movement Research! Offering inspired dance training and creative exchange, this three-day intensive is designed for intermediate and advanced dancers.
Train and Create takes place Friday, January 10 through Sunday, January 12, 2025 in the newly finished studio spaces in 122 Cultural Center. The five teachers offer a taste of BDF’s Professional Training Program and the experience of both rigorous dance training and making each day. Morning classes are taught by Shayla-Vie Jenkins and Christina Robson on all three days and in the afternoon, Cynthia Oliver, Gerald Casel, and Kimani Fowlin’s one-day workshops will be unique to their own creative processes.
Please note that due to limited capacities there will be no drop-in classes this year.
Teaching Artists:
Intensive Schedule:
Friday, January 10th – Sunday, January 12th
9:30am–11:00am Contemporary Practices with Shayla-Vie Jenkins
11:30am–1:00pm Post-Modern Moves with Christina Robson
1:00pm–2:00pm LUNCH
2:00pm–4:30pm Making/Composition
Friday with Cynthia Oliver
Saturday with Gerald Casel
Sunday with Kimani Fowlin
Individual Workshop Descriptions:
Contemporary Practices with Shayla-Vie Jenkins
Fri–Sun 9:30am–11:00am
Repetition – Continuous Motion – Sweat
This class aims to get us moving by doing—thinking—and feeling our way through the questions. We will set a tone of comfort and wakeful sensitivity as we find ‘floors’ of support in the body, space, and sonic environment. Using set and improvised center and traveling exercises, class will progress into movement ideas that attend to weight and momentum shifts, dynamic stability, specific body part initiations, risk, rebound and resiliency. We will further these investigations in detailed phrase work.
I approach class with the spirit of joy and a desire for the transformative experience that dance can engender.
What to expect: qi gong, floor work, fall and recovery, risky weight, improvisation, and phrase work. movement lineages- Ailey School (graham + horton techniques); Kevin Wynn’s quick speed; Bill T Jones + Janet Wong task-based, sequential, liquefied spine and pelvis movement; Janet Adler (Authentic Movement).
Post-Modern Moves with Christina Robson
Fri–Sun 11:30am–1:00pm
Folding, Lengthening, Spiraling, Falling
This movement class offers a variety of improvisational and choreographed structures aimed to mobilize and ground the body, rewire habits and expand qualitative range. Practices will fluctuate between solo, duet and group investigations. We will layer episodes of improvisation, weight sharing and choreographed phrase work to build dynamic support around foundational principles of weight shift, opposition, and momentum. We will seek opportunities off the vertical axis and build stability and three-dimensionality through spiral and weighted release. Phrase work is dynamic and expansive, prioritizing efficiency in and out of the floor.
What to expect: Participants can expect improvisation, phrase work, partnered activities, light weight sharing, laughs, a sweaty good time.
Making/Composition with Cynthia Oliver
Friday, January 10th 2:00pm–4:30pm
Signature Choreographies – what is it? And does it leave space for experimentation and CHANGE?!
Choreographers are persistently asked for descriptors of our work. We are asked to define what we do and where we fit in the pantheon/lineage of our respective movement histories. How do these requests limit us? how do they perhaps delimit us before we’ve had a chance to really explore the voice/physicalities we might want to inhabit? This workshop will explore these ideas and how we make and what we might want to break free of to enter into another moment. We will discuss our work, our various approaches and explore how we can expand what we do and offer ourselves freedom to do so in a supportive collective environment of peers.
What to expect: Discussion about where we are in our work; limitations and expansiveness of our respective locations; sharing of processes for making; switching things up and trying other strategies for making, for challenging ourselves, for defying even our own expectations. Can we do it? I want to.
Making/Composition with Gerald Casel
Saturday, January 11th 2:00pm–4:30pm
Making Dances
In this workshop, we will explore choreographic thinking that asks us to create dance-worlds through regenerative refusals (as borrowed from Native Hawai’ian scholar, Maile Arvin). What happens when we refuse systems that reflect and perpetuate colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal aesthetics? How do we make movement and choreography that isn’t extractive, oppressive, and violent? Together, we will respond to and create movement scores, experiment with quick writing prompts, investigate duration and legibility, and recalibrate “default” modes of being in improvisational and choreographic modes. Collectively, the group will acknowledge and welcome diverse artistic practices, ethno-cultural histories, aesthetic sensibilities, and abilities.
Please bring warm layers, kneepads, a notebook, and writing utensils.
Making/Composition with Kimani Fowlin
Sunday, January 12th 2:00pm–4:30pm
Embodied Truth
Sample this one day workshop exploring your embodied truth through methods of ritual, self reflection, and collaboration centered in African Diasporic movement. This liberatory practice of aligning mind, body, and spirit honors your past and cultivates your artistry through storytelling and community-building. You will create choreography inspired by shared truths, witnessed, and acknowledged in community. This workshop aims to initiate your practice to develop and authentically express your Embodied Truth.
What to expect: Joy in moving, embodying writing prompts, creating community through your embodied vocabulary and laughter…
Accessibility Notes
- All workshops include auditive guidance.
To request ASL interpretation or Audio Description, please email accessibility@movementresearch.org, subject line “ASL/Audio Description Request, MR x BDF” at least three (3) weeks prior to the intensive start date.
For access-related questions and requests, please contact accessibility@movementresearch.org, subject line “MR x BDF.”
Register for this workshop
In-Person
Early Bird Rate is $330 available
through Dec 1, 2024!
Enter discount code ” EARLYBIRD ” at check out!
