Technique
This class investigates the relationship between how and what you dance. The development of physical and expressive range is encouraged by a simple, function oriented, sense-based warm-up drawn from innate physical patterns that emphasize ease of movement and heightened awareness. Perceiving the personal geometry of the body's anatomy and connecting that to the imagination, broadening physical boundries, and playing with various approaches towards performing set material are the primary concerns in this class.

Contact Improvisation
contact improvisation is a duet movement form focusing on weight exchange and the language of touch in extended, creative diologue. Physical challenges awaken the reflexes, reorient the perceptions and build a vocabulary of rolling, sliding falling, and lifting. The goals are development clarity in space/time/intention; ready responsiveness to change; and access to skills, material and resources for facile and intelligent improvising.

Composition
This workshop is for choreographers and others interested in dance-making processes, with the goal of exposing, distilling and magnifying each artist’s individual voice. Participants will be asked to collect palettes of movement and movement ideas via directed improvisation, then experiment to find methods to organize the material so that it has the greatest potency to the dance-maker. How the audience builds a theory while watching a dance; what constitutes dance-events in each artist's work; how events are framed within a dance will all be discussed.

Technique
This workshop seeks to prepare an articulate, alert, and neural body, ready for precise dancing with intricate coordinations that we will work on together. There is a simple, straight forward, continuous warm-up that relies on the use of release, alighnment, momentum, weight, and strength. Clarity, simplicity of movement, attention to detail, and concentration will be our goal.

Alexander Technique for Dancers
The Alexander Technique is a means of identifying and modifying the mental and physical limitations (habits) that interfere with one's full range of possibilities, as well as honing one's ability to make choices (take responsibility). In this workshop the principles of the Alexander Technique will be explained and explored, including "inhibition", "direction", and concepts such as "non-doing". Anatomical information, observation, and the cultivation of awareness are the tools at hand for investigating limitations, possibilities, and ultimately more clearing manifesting one's intentions.

Composion: Movement; Implications and Uses
In this class, we will begin from movement, making and looking at ways to proceed into dance from there, in opposition to ways of making that begin with theme, improvisation, or systems. We will work with making movement and descisions quickly, efficiently, and with pleasure, looking at "only" movement, what it communicates and contains, and how it can be used to suggest solutions to the problem it poses. Along the way we will see and feel how the movement is communicative; can suggest structure; can take on linguistic and musical rhythms; and can contain psychology, emotion, and comment. We will see and feel how time and placement can be inherent in the nature of a particular movement; the physical can precede state of mind and/or recall state of mind; perception and sensation are related; and definitions of movement can be stretched and challenged.

Motion Techniques
A vigorous and detailed class will focus on the act of motion from the inside out. Breath work, energetics, improvisation, physics, mechanics, inversion and floor work set the stage for a long phrase of dynamic, physical, three-dimensional choreography. Working intensively with perpetual, live, visceral music feeds a performance edge into the dancing. A supportive trainig ground for a resonant and expressive body, the work is inspired by studies in Hawkins, Cunningham, ballet, jazz, martial, energetic and release forms, contact improvisation, somatics, bodywork and play.

Improvising with Contact
Contact Improvisation is an exploration of partnering, between body and gravity, dance and dancer, and dancers in relationship to each other, space, and time. In this workshop we will engage with the mechanics and physics of touch, balance, momentum, and weight applied to the investigation of solo, duet, and the ensemble, as well as specific movement material.

Composition
We will work toward sharpening perceptions, acquiring editing skills and developing a personal voice. Options include using material students have already been working on and creating phrases from mathmatical or image-based structures. We will organize material in solo, duet, and group forms to show and discuss.

Technique
The goal of this class is to teach the dancer how to be an interpreter of movement, constructing a store of tools used to approach performing. The class is centered on O'Connor's dance language, which incorporates ballet, modern, ethnic, and historical forms, both real and invented. Concepts of body architecture, locomotion through space and body centering are explored. These are combined with a unique system for phrase structures derived from a physical stream of consciousness. This is characterized by an exaggerated desity of steps and inorganic step sequencing transformed into logic. Musically, the class concentrates on extreme tempo change and dynamic finesse.

Spirals
Learn an eight minute warm-up for dance, which mobilizes all the joints and exerts all major muscle groups from the most elongated to the most shortened lengths. While moving through arcing pathways, each segment of the body's volume is constantly changing its relationship to each other segment, gravity and the performance space.

Composition: Making Dances
This workshop will concentrate on deepening a personal choreographic voice and reading the underlying message in one's creative impulse. Through the daily creation of phrases, the artist focuses his or her attention on developing an analytical eye for the fundamental metaphors in the work. The process involves locating, through a hyper personal investigation, the seeds of a universal voice. I want the artist to internalize a system of problem solving based on his or her thought process and develop the ability to bring it into the realm of theater. The goal is to gain the objectivity necessary to scrutinize a work; and bring clarity to its thematic center.

Technique
Emphasis in this class will be put on bringing seemingly incongruous materials together. Technique and warm-up exercises will be drawn from a variety of movement styles ranging from ballet and post-modern to street/club styles and martial arts. Phrases in the Elkins idiom will be introduced, emphasizing dynamic physicality and self expression.

Improvisation: The Heart/ The power of light
Using neutrality as a base we will explore choice/playing in the contact/improvisation/ technical edge, working with inner power and the energetic structure, engaging with the elements through mental precision, unhooking from our breath and movement patterns, distinguishing sensing, listening, knowing and seeing, and knowing movement as intuition of the heart. All are welcome.

Composition: The CRAFT
In this workshop, we will explore the various aspects of Space, Time, and Movement, searching for articulate words to communicate ideas, images, and concepts about dance. The workshop will incorporate exercises in structure and improvisation, as well as experimentation in the utilization of various forms of dance and movement vocabularies to create something new.