Morning Class

Morning Class: Necessary Practice

Necessary Practice is a rigorous, mindful, and somatically rooted movement class designed to provide a space for dance artists to expand their range and ease of motion, revealing their truest movement potential. Drawing from Bartenieff Fundamentals, yoga, Body Mind Centering, and PNF patterns, the class emphasizes subtlety, precision, and grace. Through detailed floor work, improvisational explorations, and phrase building based on multiple somatic principles that layer upon technically challenging movement, dancers practice and refine their performance skills, deepen physical awareness, and cultivate self-compassion—empowering them to embody any movement style with kinesthetic sensitivity and power.

What to expect:
Class begins with a thorough warm up consisting of gentle floor-work (from Bartenieff Fundamentals and PNF patterns) and progresses to standing exercises and movement phrases that travel across, in and out of the floor to investigate flow and energy while paying attention to the dancer’s awareness of time, energy, focus, breath, and intimate relationship to gravity. Class culminates with a dance phrase that integrates mind and body, harmoniously moving with greater articulation, expressivity, and intent. This class is best suited for intermediate to advanced dancers who are thinking about sustainable dance practices and injury prevention as they integrate somatics into highly physical dancing. This class also promotes self-compassion as an antidote to histories of harmful dance training — using principles of self-kindness (versus self-criticism), mindfulness (versus rumination), and common humanity (versus isolation and competition). We will awaken the subtle body, question virtuosity, breathe with intention, feel our movement, learn complex phrases, improvise, be in community, and unlearn patterns that no longer serve who we are as movement artists.

For class-related questions, please email programs@movementresearch.org.