Technique
This class seeks to prepare an articulate, alert and neutral body, ready for precise dancing with intricate coordinations that we will work on together. There is a simple straightforward continuous warm-up that relies on the use of release, alignment, 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 mental and physical habits that interfere with one's ability to attend to the moment and make choices. Through observation, diologue and hands-on work, this workshop aims to introduce principles of the technique and examine common assumptions (and their accompanying sensations of such dancerly concerns as strength, support, stability and power, opening the body and brain to new information and refining the organization of the performing body and mind.

Composition
In this workshop we will research individual approaches to composition and form through perceptual experiments with space, time, and energy. We will isolate improvisational activities such as making transitions, creating locations, and sustaining energetic states, and other strategies to bring a deeper understanding to our personal and intrinsic improvisational and compositional logics. From this process we will create small pieces and scores while looking at the potential of dance to actively engage contemporary issues through perception and embodied practice and form.

Technique
This Contemporary Movement class is based on Modern, full-bodied, grounded and rhythm-based movement, utilizing elements and movement languages from cultures of the southern US, Trinidad, and Tobago, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Senegal, and Cameroon. Attention and focus is maintained on the weight and direction of the pelvis, the use of the full foot, and use of the full range of the demi-plie, sometimes accompanied by driving rhythms created through stamping, clapping, shouting and aspirated breathing that traditionally propelled the dancer to states of ecstasy.

Klein/Mahler Technique: Re-Education and Respect for the Body
The purpose of the work done in class is to re-educate one's body, with an interweaving of theory and practice on a physical and organic level. Movement efficiency and postural re-education begin with detailed work on the key structural supports of the body, the pelvis and the Sacro-illiac joint. Our movement work will define and make a reality of "bringing the pelvis on top of the legs". The result is clarity, sureness of movement and a new level of understanding the innate intelligence of the body. The class is open to all levels, dancers and non-dancers alike.

Composition: Making Dances
Tere O'Connor's choreoraphic workshop grew organically out of his own auto-didactic research into the form. Rejecting a "good/bad" paradigm, his desire is for artists to create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought process and to rigorously persue the "science" of their poetics. Through the daily creation of little dance works, the artisst focuses his/her attention on developing an analytical eye for the fundamental metaphors in the work. We will look to create dances whose legibility is born of internal systems-detached from the denotative interpretation of "symbols".

Technique
The classes are influenced by Nelson's 20 years of continuing study with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein, and by more recent studies in Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation and Body-Mind Centering. We will begin with a warm-up that focuses mostly on our skeletal structure to access the deep supporting muscles of the bosy, allowing mobility and suppleness in the superficical muscles and emphasizes the connection to and use of the floor. The class builds from simple exercises to phrases of movement that involve moving boldly, covering lots of space and finding a specificity and ease in our dancing.

Improvisation: Foundations of Improvisation- Researching Movement and Mind
We look at the ordinary movement from our daily lives as a source for our dancing and study how the mind and body work together to compose our actions. The primal patterns of locomotion that umderlie and support our physical action are a foundation and warm-up: rolls, spirals, crawling patterns, crouching, sitting, standing, walking, running and the transitions between. We learn one specific exercise that is a key for researching our own movement and mind and a tool to focus on the details of our sensory experience and perceptions. Areas of focus are: gravity, touch, vision, rhythm and sequence.

Composition/Repertory
Known for creating movement vocabulary with each new work, Uchizono conducts a composition class, delighting in ways to develop material from a specific idea while exploring how one looks at work. Sections from the company's repertory relating to the ideas explored in the lab add to the experience.

Technique
Using the luxury of five continuous days of dancing together, we will take the time to investigate different states of awareness. Each class will be three- fold, beginning with a guided improvisation to inspire the imagination to expand into the unique life of differnet parts of the body, followed by dancing within technical forms to support our range and work as dancers, and concluding with a phrase that integrates concepts of weight, lightness, initiation and intention. The technical forms and phrase will be specifically structured to build our knowledge of individual physical patterns that may be blocking us from deepening the use of ourselves as artists. In the process of learning a phrase, we can observe how we retain "set" material. The merging of the unconscious life of movement through improvisation and conscious attention to the physical imagination is part of the energizing practice we will explore in each class.

Releasing
Through spacially designed images, we will enable ourselves to let go of hidden tensions and realign with the natural forces of gravity and counter balance. Through the releasing process, we will learn howto move with more freedom and economy. Spontaneous movement explorations will allow us to creatively integrate these changes in our bodies. Hands on work will reinforce the given directions of energy flow along the body. Interwoven music will create an atmosphere to journey into a deeper releasing state.

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
The workshop will rely on discourse, both choreographic and verbal, as a means of critical reflection of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about dance and choreography, as well as the assumptions of the traditions in which we each participate. 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. Some points of departure for investigation and discussion include: 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; how each artist creates consonance and dissonance; and participation, non-participation or transgression of existing traditions.

Technique
This warm-up and movement workshop will develop from simple skeletal mobility sequences to full-out movement forms. Emphasis will be placed on the joints, examining how their range of motion relates to alignment, support, weight in the course of movement. We will also focus on how the inherent lines in the body's anatomy can offer movement materialin a full range: from the abstract to the dramatic. The class will culminate in traveling sequences and longer movement phrases.

Improvisation
This workshop will focus on techniques for training the body, resources for choreographic material and miniature labratories for studying human behavior. First: basic skills, principles and vocabulary from contact improvisation. Second: The group practice of improvisation in duets, trios, quintets. Basic scores ( grids, corridors, six treasures, etc) will be used to clarify time, space, and relationship while each dancer works at refining subtle qualitative and energetic states. These practices develop the ability to support, focus or transform a physical image within an unfolding dramatic scenario.

Composition: Dancing Text/Texting Dance
In this workshop we will use several improvisation strategies to open a free flow of immediate, spontaneous and automatic writing, speaking, and dancing. We will use the resultant dance and text to construct impromptu group pieces as well as a means toward broadening self expression in solo work.