Alice Chauchat IDD Workshop
Taking the following as an ambitious base, we'll try out various configurations in which we might think-act together what a community choreography could be, understanding the idea of community not in terms of difference from other groups but in terms of a specific way of being together: Ten statements on collective practice: 1. members of the group participate with their entire bodies, experiences and thoughts 2. each member is responsible for what she shares within the group 3. each member is responsible for the way she processes what is shared within the group 4. short-cut negotiations 5. general agreement is not desirable 6. create a common that is based on individual experience 7. practitioners should focus on their own activity rather than on the general composition 8. only the practitioners themselves can evaluate their own activity 9. leave space for individuals to resist the group dynamics 10. don't direct each other *ten statements is a game in everybody's toolbox

Express Train to States of Grace
$307 MARCH 6-10 2013 (INCLUDES UNDERSCORE TALK-THROUGH AND PRACTICE ON MARCH 9 AND 10) Like scaling Mt Everest, States of Grace is a pinnacle � elusive, ever-present, dangerous, fantasized, in our minds. And our bodies. “States of Grace� is what can happen when all the balls are in the air at once: solo dancing, contact improvisation, non-CI improvisation, contemplation, composition, listening, performance/art, mystery, and humanity. Many questions. Embodied research. Can we move easily between solo, contact improvisation, group work, somatic sources and impulses, and compositional awareness? What does this make? Only way to discover is to do it and find out. The Underscore on Sunday is the culminating vehicle for our discoveries. Participants should have previous experience with Contact Improvisation. Workshop locations vary: WED-FRI 10am-6pm will take place at Eden’s Expressway. SAT 10:30am-5:30pm and 6-7:45pm, Underscore talk-thru, will take place at Gibney Dance Center. SUN 12-4pm, Underscore practice, will take place at New York City Center.

THE UNDERSCORE: a talk and a practice with Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas (music)
$40 (THE OPTION TO ATTEND THE UNDERSCORE EVENTS ONLY IS NOW SOLD OUT. TO ATTEND THE FULL STATES OF GRACE WORKSHOP, SEE ABOVE.) The Underscore is a long jamming/contact/improvisation/composition score that Nancy has been developing since the early 1990s as a framework for dance improvisation research. It guides dancers through a series of "changing states" � from solo relaxation and sensitizing to gravity and support, through group circulation and interaction, contact improvisation engagements, opening out to full group improvisation, and back to rest and reflection. Previous experience with Contact Improvisation and attendance at the talk is required for participation in the Underscore practice. Locations vary: March 9 SAT 6-7:45pm, Underscore talk-thru will talk place at Gibney Dance Center. March 10 SUN 12-4pm, Underscore practice will take place at New York City Center.

Forsythe Improv and Phrase Workshop
SCHEDULE AND LOCATION CHANGE: On TUESDAY 3/12 the workshop will take place at AVENUE C STUDIO (55 Avenue C) from 1-3pm! All other days will be held at Gibney Dance Center from 2-4pm. Long time Forsythe dancer Elizabeth Corbett guides an exploration into the working methodologies inspired by the creative processes of William Forsythe. In this workshop dancers explore and develop improvisation approaches and deconstruction of Forsythe's phrase work toward accessing the inner logic and unfolding mechanisms of the work.

What is My Work? A workshop based on the format of a peer panel review
This workshop addresses the necessity for a practice that generates language to support one's work and the work of others. We will find ways to create that language in a peer setting through sharing, seeing, dialoguing, and creative writing exercises. In this workshop, 4-5 students show up to 20 min. of work (live or video), and the class discusses the work and investigates the process of discussion as well. Be prepared with a segment of your artist statement or some language about your excerpt, along with a pen

Embodying and Exchanging Energy
This workshop will explore how individuals and groups embody and exchange “energy.� We will keep an open mind about how energy is present, sensed, and a source in us: inspiration, creativity, motivation, connection, collaboration, presence, emotion, spirituality – energy forms that exist in our physical and non physical experience, shaping our interactions. Guided experiences and improvisational forms bring our heightened awareness and dimensional bodies into a potent energetic state to create a supportive and collaborative environment, leading us to shared dancing, creativity, and discourse.

Low, Middle, High
Geared towards children ages 5-10. Mariangela will share with children how to make small dances by combing simple body actions. Children will explore the levels in which the body can move through the space and find infinite possibilities. Mainly this class will be an opportunity to have fun outside while dancing and sharing with friends.

Why I am not a painter
This is a writing workshop. It is open to anyone who wants to play with words, to see what they can do, and how. But it is made with dance-artists in mind. How do words live in time and space, whether on the stage, the page or in the mind? Critical writing, creative writing, performance texts… are they really such different creatures? Does a dancer have a particular way of approaching language? What about a writer who spends so much of her time watching dancers? So many questions. We’ll spend our time looking for answers, individually and as a group.

Kid's class with Yvonne Meier
Geared towards children ages 4-6. We will warm up with the principals of straight, round and curvy. Then we will engage in an extraordinary freeze dance using fancy scores. Class will end with locomotion like walking like a spider across the floor.

Look at me Don't Look at me: the natural version
Look at me Don't Look at me: the natural version is a workshop on improvisation that deals directly with language, the felt, a questioning and widening of space. This gathering follows in my research and practice of improvisation, performativity and choreography, allowing for an agenda to build on itself among those who are present. Any score generated is located experientially. The culture of the workshop maintains a dedication to improvisation in all its glory; there is no goal of a thesis statement. There is no word limit. We can delete our mission statements. We don't have to get to the point. We will honor an interrogation of performance that understands the complexities of being looked at and all the desires and expectations that follow. Something to stand on. We will consider our bodies as institutions that generate a governing order.

Park Dance, Nature Style
How can our park behaviors of rolling, frolicking, tree hugging, birdwatching, and sunbathing inspire and deepen our creative practices? Icy Spicy Leoncie says it best: “MAN! LET’S HAVE FUN.� Let’s use the park to lighten up and enlighten our movement investigations, going into the depths of serious play. An outdoor inspired warm-up will lead us to improvisation, watching, talking, spontaneously devised nature rituals, immediate composition, and performance for each other and anyone else who wants to watch. We’ll take advantage of what the park has to offer to our senses and let this expand our sensibilities. With nature as our backdrop, classroom, communal body, support, and container, we’ll see how deepening our ability to experience enhances our creative practices and vice versa.

Writing with Dance
Writing with Dance will focus on the art of dance criticism and will be grounded in the details of body-based, live performance. How do we talk and write about dance? How do our experiences and conversations translate to the page? So much dance writing and criticism tries to convince us that the writer is operating from a neutral or expert position; and that a performance can be reduced or understood as one thing; and that as such, it has some kind of inherent value or non-value. Through this process of commodification, the work is reduced, reified, and objectified, whereby emphasis is rendered solely on product and not on process or method. In these two hours, we will discuss ways that we as writers can focus on an artist’s process, as we learn to write “with� dance as opposed to writing “about� it. Bring in a piece of your own dance writing to share if you want, as we explore our various visions of dance writing and criticism.

Body Sound
Sinha’s vocal performance practice integrates raw utterance, speech, song, and raga (Indian tonal systems) with sensitivity to the body, and explores an elemental, primal way of sounding. Yamazaki’s movement practice, which is grounded in butoh and Noguchi Gymnastics, examines how the flow of water in a body and the vibration of our own voice transforms into movements. The voice will be used to explore our internal movements and blocks, finding our individual balance between sounding and listening, being alone and relating to others, and connecting to the space around us in which stillness and movements coexist. This workshop is open to anyone with curiosity to explore their own voice and body. Workshop participants will perform at First Street Green on Saturday, May 25.

Still Sounding, Still Standing
Everyone welcome! This practice connects you to the inner and outer landscapes of your body by listening, sounding, standing and moving. The workshop will be followed by a free performance with participants of Movement Research’s “Body Sound� workshop.

Move to Heal
This class is for those struggling with health issues of their own or that of a loved one. We use movement and somatic practices to support healing processes. Sourcing from both western and eastern traditions, we will play with movement, breath, sound and imagery to encourage self-empowerment as it relates to our health and well-being.

Workshop with Diana Crum
Using play as a research practice, we will spontaneously move in response to the stimuli in the park. We will practice awareness through improvisation and phrase-making. We'll also get lost in the complicated way movement teaches us about where we are. It is open to all.

A Workshop on Navigation From the Point of View of the Body
The workshop will begin with a heightening of our own navigational strategies through the senses of sight, sound, smell and touch. This will include exercises that cultivate our ability to localize sounds, sensitize our responses to light and our perception of shape, touch and direction. Once our perceptions are tuned and our desires are activated we will begin moving in response to our environment, navigating into and from our physical imaginations as we integrate dancing into the landscape.

Performers and Authorship
SOLD OUT AS OF 6/17/13. TO BE ADDED TO THE WAITLIST EMAIL info@movementresearch.org A performer's authorship is an ongoing series of events: looping back, rebuilding, erasing, uncovering, disenchanting, replacing, and stumbling into unknown territory. Anything you as a performer represent or produce is temporary, but part of a contained continuity. This continuity is not necessarily progressive, doesn't necessarily improve or devolve. It has plasticity. It's a continuity that both accepts and resists form, folds and swells, is flexible and forceful. This workshop aims at adding to the ongoing process of skillful perception by engaging with submerged fictions through physical performance practices. Language will be useful for its ability to distinguish one thing from another. Physical experience will be useful for its ability to humble and destabilize these distinctions. Performance experience will be useful.

SHAKE/WALK Workshop
Taking two everyday forms of movement, we will allow these forms to disorganize within, and to be disorganizing of, our bodies. The sensations that arise within this unstable and unbound matrix range from relaxing to energizing, from disorienting to freeing. Speculating on the physical and perceptual states that occur amidst the contingencies of environmental trauma and the precarities of economic collapse, this workshop iteration explores locating this improvisational practice in an outdoor urban environment, beyond the four walls of the studio. Open to movers of all backgrounds; wear comfortable street or dance clothes.