Complimentary Technique
We start with a simple straight forward standing warm up using body awareness and alignment. This warm up takes around 45 minutes. The dancing that follows draws from repertory and encourages big, full dancing with attention to detail.

Alexander Technique for Dancers
The Alexander Technique is a means of identifying mental and physical habits that interfere with ones ability to attend to the moment and make choices. Through observation, dialog 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, power and subtlety, opening the body and brain to new information and refining the organization of the performing body and mind.

Making Dances
Tere O’Connor has spent years developing methods to facilitate choreographic explorations for artists. Born as a consequence of his own auto-didactic journey into choreography, this workshop has subsequently become integral to his work. It is a dialogue with the process of art-making. He attempts to create an awareness of prejudices and affinities and look at the interrelatedness of these in each artist’s work. He promotes development of the objectivity required to locate clear intentions detached from the accidents of representation. Rejecting a “good/bad� paradigm, his desire is for artists to create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought and to rigorously pursue the “science� of their poetics. Through the daily creation of little dance works and group discussions, the artist focuses his/her attention on how the action they are engaged in contains meaning, how to grow this in choreographic terms and to how to edit from internal and external sources. The workshop welcomes choreographers, performers, designers etc, doing the same work from different points of view, but looking for ways to corral into usage the questions that arise through process

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.

Foundations of Improvisation: Researching Movement, Mind, and Flow of Information
This work addresses our underlying physical dialogue with the environment and provides tools for researching your own movement choices and understanding dancing as a language of relationship. Specific explorations offer ways to re-focus and play with the details of our sensory experience, perception, and action. We work with gravity, touch, vision, rhythm, & sequence.

Composition
I teach from the point of view that making is an endless quest with ever shifting ground. I encourage an attitude of making as thinking, not regarding plans or themes as pre-requisites. I regard teaching as a conversational mode; my exercises are proposals in action, using intuition, perception, cognition, interiority, emotional distance, spontaneity, pleasure, will, reflection, humor.

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 the Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation and Body-Mind Centering®. We begin with a warm-up that focuses mostly on our skeletal structure to access the deep supporting muscles of the body, allowing mobility and suppleness in the superficial muscles and emphasizing the connection to and use of the floor. The class builds from simple exercises to phrases of movement that involve moving boldly and covering space, and finding a strength, specificity and ease in our dancing.

Spirals
Learn a choreography which mobilizes all our freely moveable joints and exerts all our major muscle groups from their most elongated to their most shortened lengths. While moving through arcing pathways, each segment of our body volume is constantly changing its relationship with each other segment, as well as with gravity and our performance environment. This type of continuous change provides a stimulating warm-up for our sensorimotor nervous system as well as our musculo-skeletal system.

Re-Education of the Body – Klein Technique as taught by Barbara Mahler
The pelvis is the keystone for both movement and support. In this workshop we will break down the deep connections within the pelvis to create a stronger, more facile moving body, whether in dance, sports, or life. These deep connections allow for an ease and freedom that working on the outer muscles cannot facilitate. The workshop is meant to create a dialogue and a challenge as to the definitions of “center,� “core,� and “grounded.� My work is based on 30 plus years in investigating the essence of the body in motion, influenced by the mentorship of Dr. Fritz Smith, Professor Dorothy Vislocky, and most importantly Susan T. Klein.

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.

LD4D (LIghting Design for Dance)
This classroom and practical workshop will be a technical tutorial and discussion about the process of creating lighting designs for dance. All efforts will be made to demystify lighting in order to promote informative decision making and more easeful discussion in future collaborative processes. This workshop will interface with Sarah Michelson¹s composition class and participants will have the opportunity to light a short piece by these MELT students in a closed environment followed by a critique and discussion. In order to take this class, you must be present for all workshop dates.

Technique
Using improvisational and set warm-ups we will focus on the volume and weight inside the body and its relationship to the floor. Exercises that bring awareness to the sternum and pelvic floor encourage the feeling of release in the limbs from those places of support, allowing us to fall and suspend off-center. Using these physical tools inside technical patterns and phrase material, we will work towards a more grounded and direct approach to movement.

Releasing
Through specially designed images, we will enable ourselves to let go of hidden tensions and realign with the natural forces of gravity and counterbalance. Through the releasing process, we will learn to 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.

Making Work
I have a confession to make. I like making pieces. I love it in fact. I get ideas all the time to make stuff, and even when I don’t have ideas I’ll foolishly say yes to some gig and so I start and then something happens even if I don’t understand how or why. I think if I didn’t make stuff I’d kill myself. Seriously. This workshop is about making performance and talking about that.

Technique
The Workshop encourages students to learn how to maximize the use of the warmed-up body to increase their movement possibilities and take risks in dancing. The initial warm-up uses elements from Yoga, Ballet and Release technique to focus on discovering and strengthening connections within the body’s structure and to find a sense of fluidity in the joints. Dancers will develop an understanding of the connections between their body, the floor and how using momentum and breath allows an exploration of physically full dancing with the least amount of muscular tension. During phrase work the dancers will learn how to incorporate all the information from the warm–up to aid the dancer in the execution of more complicated sequences, as well as continuing to control the use of breath which can help maintain a strong center from which one can explode.

Speaking, Singing, and Making Sound
This workshop is tailored specifically for dancers wishing to develop vocal skills for various types of performance. Having an accurate image, understanding and sensation of the anatomy and mechanics of making sound helps you build a reliable, technical foundation from which to explore your vocal range. Through the lens of the Alexander Technique, you will learn how your breath and whole body support the actions of speaking, singing and making sound; how to control volume and pitch effectively; how good vocal technique can prevent voice loss during a long performance run; how to feel comfortable using your voice; and, how knowledge of good vocal technique can enhance your overall balance and movement experience. Bring your questions and concerns about speaking and singing as well as any text, song or sounds you may currently be working with.

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 develop palettes of materials�movement, ideas, questions�via directed improvisation, then experiment to find different strategies for organizing the materials. Points-of-departure for investigation include: how the audience builds a theory while watching a dance, what constitutes dance-events in each artist’s work, how events are framed, issues of consonance and dissonance, and participation or non-participation in existing traditions.

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 different 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 our selves 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.

Improvisation
This intensive will combine applications of Body-Mind Centering®, skills and practices of Contact Improvisation, and tunings of improvisational approaches in solo, duet and ensemble dancing. We will make the invisible visible, learning more about the interior of the body and our ideas, and find pathways to external space, time, and place. We will play with structures for improvising where we can both witness and participate, discovering new challenges and risks in our movement vocabulary. Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) is an eclectic and dynamic approach to somatic training and re-education developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Contact Improvisation is a duet dance form initiated by dancer Steve Paxton in 1972 that investigates balance, trust, momentum, gravity, stillness, and perceptual play.

Dacing 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.